I do know something about. I started my schooling at one which had just four teachers. It was actually considered to be quite a large school in a rural area.
I should not have been there at all really but Mum was anxious to have me out of the house. She had my two year old brother and my four month old sister at home. I was four and a quirk of the system which said you could begin school the year you turned five meant I was eligible to go. It did not matter in the least that I would not be five years of age for another eleven months. I could read. It was time to start school.
I did not particularly like school. For the most part I was bored by it. My "daily diary sentence" would be written down for me but the teacher would get impatient when I wanted "big words" even if I could spell them. Words like "extendable" (in relation to a ladder) and "thermometer" were not supposed to be in a five year old child's school reading vocabulary. I was allowed to use them only because I could spell them. Yes, I must have been a very "difficult" child.
I only had a year at that school before the Senior Cat was transferred back to the city. I was sent to a big city school and in the infants you went from "reception" to "lower one" to "upper one" and "lower two to upper two". I was put in "upper one" because of my age. I lasted the first of the three terms and was put into upper two where I probably continued to be a nuisance.
It was not until I reached what was then known as "grade six" that the Senior Cat was "promoted" to be the teacher in charge of a two teacher school. Mum went back to work then and she taught the first three years of school in one room. My father had everyone else in the other room. It meant the older children had to work alone sometimes. He had four "grades" he was supposed to teach and then the supervision of the correspondence school lessons for the "year eight" students. It says a great deal for the strength and stability of their marriage and their ability to teach that this arrangement actually worked. All the same it was not an ideal situation. The Senior Cat was aware of that but knew we were better off than the school with just eight children in it about an hour a way. There was another one in yet another direction with eleven children. Ours was a "big" school with the forty-four or five enrolled in it.
At the primary school level these small schools were managed. Get a good teacher or teachers and they could even be good schools. Get a bad teacher or a lazy one and children did not learn a great deal. It was often seen as not being of any particular concern. The boys would go back on to the farm as soon as they reached an age where they could legally leave school. Some of them did not even do correspondence work and our Correspondence School, along with the School of the Air, was very good indeed. The boys though would sometimes repeat year seven twice or three times. Each year, before school had ended, they would be at home helping with the harvest. It was expected that the girls would, with rare exceptions, get married. It was only the children of the "floating population", those who were there for only a couple of years before being moved on, who were thought to be interested in doing more.
The Senior Cat tried to change that and did succeed in seeing a couple of more able children sent off to board with families in a more distant town. Boarding school was not an option, people could not afford it in the most remote areas.
I look back on it now, after reading a description by someone of their school days, and realise it was not a good education. Even the best teachers could not give a bright child a good education. You could get "doubly promoted" or "skip a year" and that was about it. My brother and I were fortunate in that the Senior Cat organised our membership of the Country Children's Lending Service and the librarians there sent out the six books we were permitted to borrow (they came as parcel post on the twice weekly train service) more often than was really allowed. He also encouraged us to listen to "the Argonauts", a children's radio program. We were always thrilled when our letters to Mac were read on air.
We missed out on a lot of the resources available to city schools, or even larger rural schools. At secondary level I was never able to study a modern language. The Senior Cat gave me Latin lessons when he had the time. I had the textbook and was really expected to teach myself.
But there were two things which did happen. The first was that I had to find out how to learn alone. I had to learn without adult supervision. I am not sure it taught "self-discipline" but I had plenty of curiosity about the things which interested me. Did that help? Yes and the Senior Cat encouraged me and my brother. We had books and we were encouraged to do things, make things, find out about things.
The other thing that happened was that, like all other children in the school, we knew that older children were expected to watch out for younger children. It was not just that you might have a younger sibling in the same classroom (and certainly in the same school) but out in the playground there was always someone watching. We might not even have been conscious of watching but we did, especially the girls. Disagreements were broken up quickly. If a small child fell then an older child would deal with it unless they thought an injury deserved adult attention.
I don't think that happens now. In big city schools the adults dealt with things we thought of as our responsibility. In rural schools I am told teachers are too worried about liability issues to let it happen the way it once did. It was part of growing up back then and we might just have been better off because of it.
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