Paying rural teachers more

may not be the answer. The suggestion, in this morning's paper, that those "volunteering" to go should be paid another $20,000 on top of their current salaries and allowances is interesting but will it work?

We have a good many rural schools in this state, some of them in very remote areas. There aren't too many "one teacher schools" left. They have been closed in favour of sending children long distances by bus to larger schools with "better facilities". Even some of those "larger schools" are not the answer.

The Senior Cat started his teaching career in a "one teacher school". It was a very remote school indeed and, as a city born and bred boy, he was completely out of place in a tiny community on the railway line which runs up to the other end of the continent. He stuck it out but the Education Department must have realised it was not the right thing. He had to live at the pub because there was no other accommodation available...and he didn't drink alcohol. He knew nothing about football or racing or mustering cattle...and they were the only topics of conversation among the men. The Senior Cat spent a year there before being moved to a not quite so remote but still remote location with another one teacher school. He spent two years there and, having met our mother at a New Year's Eve party in the city, was itching to get a transfer to somewhere closer so he could marry her. 

We went to look at that school twelve years later when we lived in another location further up the track. It had not changed. It was still a single class room on a rough plot of land with "long drop dunnies" on the far side of the plot. The children were still washing their hands in a bucket of water put there by the "water monitor" first thing in the morning. I think there were eleven children enrolled. That was three better than another school. We thought our school was "big". Our parents taught forty-six children between them. 

You cannot provide the same facilities even for forty-six children. We went on after two years to a much bigger school but it was still too small to provide the same facilities as a big city school. The "secondary" section was just one class, the first in the new "area" school. There was no subject choice. We were taught the basics, nothing more. The Senior Cat did his best but he had inexperienced teachers in their first year out. In many ways the three years we spent there were good for other reasons but the education we were getting was not good. 

We went on to yet another rural school, a big "area" school. There were more students but similar problems. In the "academic" stream there were no subject choices. You did English, two unit maths, physics, chemistry, geography, history and woodwork or needlework. Both the geography and the history syllabus varied little from what we had been taught in the primary section. It allowed the primary teachers to take classes in those subjects in the secondary section. There were no languages taught. The "area" stream added metalwork, cookery, agricultural studies and art instead of physics, chemistry, geography and history.  Yes, it was an education of sorts.

Surprisingly some of us actually managed to go on to higher education but there were too many left behind and would it change now? I doubt it. 

Young and inexperienced teachers might think the extra money would be good for the couple of years proposed but they would want to move on. If you really are keen on teaching then the facilities are not there even now. You won't have the same opportunities to mix and meet. You are isolated in many ways that only become obvious when you are there. Country people are often incredibly friendly and welcoming but there is always the sense of being an "outsider" and having to constantly watch what you do and say. 

Trying to get older and more experienced teachers to go and stay will be much harder, especially when the idea of permanent employment has given away to short term contracts. Teachers want to buy their own homes in the city now. They don't want their children to have a lesser education.

To lift rural education to the same standard as city education and with all the same choices would be impossibly expensive. I thought of all that. I also thought of the demands made by some to teach aboriginal children in their "first language" and how that is even more impossible to do. We are setting too many children up to fail. Education, a good education, is expensive. It is about much more than paying teachers more for a couple of years.