The One Teacher School
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
One of the responsibilities that the country parson had was to take classes of religious instruction in the local schools. Soon after my arrival in Ararat I discovered that I was expected to take classes in the high school but then I also offered classes where no one else was anxious to go – namely to the one teacher schools in the little rural villages that surrounded the small country town of Ararat, the gateway to the Wimmera.
The classes in the Ararat High School I thoroughly enjoyed. I had been teaching religious instruction to high school classes for six years and had built up quite a collection of material and had a lot of help from the agreed syllabus of the Council of Christian Education in Schools.
I used to take six assemblies a week in the Ararat High School with about 150 students in each assembly. Each assembly ran for 40 minutes. I asked the Salvation Army Captain, Captain Wilson to join with me and together, with occasional help from the Presbyterian minister if Captain Wilson was away, I would teach the large assembly using a structured curriculum, music and a lot of illustrative material and films which I had railed up from Melbourne. I gradually came to know the students quite well and felt we were doing a good job. The students actually enjoyed religious instruction because it was an opportunity to look at the whole issue of moral values in the community, direction and purpose of life, and how people should relate to the pressures and challenges of everyday living.
Shortly after this I was approached by the Principal of the School and asked if I would be the co-ordinator of all the official examinations on behalf of the University Examinations Board. I did not really understand what this involved but as a university graduate I had certainly had my share of exams over the years so I accepted the position with some degree of enthusiasm.
However the job entailed a lot more than I had ever realized. For example almost every Saturday morning I was involved in conducting one kind of exam or another. I conducted the police entrance exams, the state nurses qualifications exams, the state electricity commission’s linesmen’s exams, and all the various exams for the public service. Every kind of examination required for university, the tech school, the public service or public instrumentalities was conducted for rural people in an examination centre. Ararat was the examination centre for the Wimmera. So I soon found that week after week I would be conducting exams for small numbers of people and occasionally for very large numbers of people.
While supervising the exams I used to take a spare copy of the paper and see if I could meet the entrance requirement by passing the exam. As time went by I realized I could join the police force, the prison warders force, gain nurses registration as a trainee nurse, and half a dozen other qualifications. My favourite exam was one I conducted for the Postmaster General for the “linesmen in training”. This examination paper did not anticipate a very high degree of literary skill but instead had little drawings of tools marked A to D and the question would be “tick which one is a screwdriver” or “which of the four tools would you use for driving in a nail?” After supervising a dozen or more exams I decided that I could certainly pass the linesmen in training exam.
However, 1964 was the year the HSC papers were stolen just prior to the exam and sold to some students who desired to cheat.
When I was conducting on behalf of the university, the HSC exams in the school, we had about 120 students sitting. We had intense security arrangements about the examination papers. At first, though, I felt that most of these security matters were extreme because the papers had to be kept in a locked safe, in a locked room, inside sealed tin boxes which were also locked and inside the tin boxes would be the examination papers in large sealed envelopes. These were doubly sealed and initialled and I was to break them open only in the presence of a member of my examination staff who would need to sign the time the seals were broken.
As there was a fair amount of work to be done in preparation for an exam the temptation was to do some of it the night before, but I decided I had better keep the security arrangements by the book. The night before the HSC exam was to be held I was visited by two members of the local police force. They had been sent on instruction from the Minister of Education to visit the examination supervisor in their region and to examine the seals on his packs of examination papers in order to try to find which one had been broken and from which packet the stolen papers had come.
Thankfully it was not mine. However, the exam was cancelled next morning and I had the sorry duty of informing the 120 students who sat before us ready to start their exam that it had, at the last moment, been cancelled because someone had stolen some papers. Even though it was not in our region, the exam would have to be sat for in three weeks time.
I am always grateful for the opportunity I had over the next couple of years as a country parson to spend my time with thousands of aspiring job applicants both those doing Form 5 and 6 exams, those who were sitting as external students for various university subjects in various universities around the world, and all those who were doing examinations for the armed forces, the police, the public service and the like.
However, teaching in the one teacher schools became quite a delight in itself. None of the other clergy in Ararat, for some reason or other, seemed to appreciate the wonderful opportunity we had in teaching religious instruction in the little one teacher schools. I guess many of them thought that driving forty or fifty minutes down an unmade country road to a tiny village where there would only be eight students in a class, teaching them for forty minutes, and then returning, was hardly worthwhile. But I felt it was and therefore undertook to teach each week at the Moyston School, at Ross Bridge, and at Jacksons Creek. I also took occasional classes out at Amphitheatre. None of these schools had more than 15 children in them.
I used to take out a battery operated record player because two of the schools did not even have electricity to them. We would play both children’s stories and children’s hymns on a series of records on the battery operated record player. Because each school consisted of students ranging from Grade 1 through to Grade 8, I had to have aspects of lessons suitable for children at various age groups.
How I admired the teachers in these one teacher schools. They appreciated my coming because I was one of the few adults with whom they had contact during their working week. They generally felt under-valued by the parents, neglected by the State Government and continually under threat of closure from the Education Department. They had to teach all children at all grades at the same time each day and every day by themselves.
Each of the one teacher schools were taught by single women. Miss Swagger at Moyston and Miss Schurmann at Jacksons Creek were two particularly delightful single lady teachers. They came from the Lutheran area around Willaura way and had applied for schools which were not far from their own home. They were utterly dedicated committed Christian teachers who gave the children in the one teacher school a far better education, I am sure, than those in crowded city classes ever received. They were the front line teachers of the Education Department and I doubt if they have ever been recognised for the quality of their service. Each night after school they would be required to spend hours in preparation of lessons for the next day at Grade 1 or 2, or 4 or 5, or 6 because while they would be teaching one class and showing by personal demonstration they needed to have enough written work prepared for the other five, six or seven classes.
The children sat in rows across the one room in the school at Jacksons Creek. The school itself consisted of an outside toilet for both boys and girls, an entry porch, the one classroom and a small lean-to teacher’s room cum store room at the back. There was no electricity and an open fireplace in the corner. The teacher was required to cut wood, to light the fires, to clean the school, to be responsible for security, the condition of the playgrounds and the arrangement, every now and then, for the toilet holes to be filled in and the toilet to be slid over a new hole which would be dug in the earth beneath.
Two of the teachers rode horses to school and most of the children did as well. The kids would come on horseback, take the saddles off and place them in the foyer to the school. On entering the small foyer it was nothing to see a dozen saddles and saddle cloths, bridles and bits, stacked one on top of each other in the same way as a suburban school would have the children’s raincoats.
Jacksons Creek was near to the end of its time. The number of children attending it had been declining over the years and everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the Education Department closed it down. I think during my time we had only eight or nine enrolled children which was the bare minimum. Any further decline in numbers would mean that the parents would then have the responsibility of driving their children every day a half hour or more to a main road where they would then wait for a bus to bring them into Ararat. Along the main roads leading into Ararat there would be old water tanks rusted out lying on their side but these were actually shelters used by the children in inclement weather while they waited for the buses, or in which they would park their pushbikes if they lived close enough to cycle to the road.
In case you think a drive in the country once a week to visit a one teacher school would be a pleasant journey let me quickly assure you that throughout winter it was a nightmare. The unmade roads were corrugated and muddy, frequently very boggy. Many an occasion, on my way to school, I have had the car sink up to its axles in mud, and had to roll up my trousers, take off shoes and socks and manually lift and push the car out of the bog. I always carried several old wheat bags with me so that I could make some tracks over the mud. On the way to Jacksons Creek, we had to cross the creek itself. There was a ford which frequently was running two feet or more deep with water. Most city people would baulk at attempting to drive a car through water so deep, but in the country you get used to doing things like that. Before I would enter the flooded ford, I would take out a chaff bag from the boot of the car and attach it to the front bumper bar. That particular bag had a couple of bricks in it which allowed it to drag back underneath the car. I would then take off shoes and socks and drive the car with bare feet. The old Morris Oxford would enter the creek at a reasonable speed and I would keep the revs up slipping the clutch. The chaff bag would slide underneath the car and make a pocket of air immediately under the fan so water was not splashed up by the fan over the distributor and spark plugs. At least that was the theory. On more than one occasion I let the revs get too low and the car would stop half way across a flooded ford. On those occasions in the pouring rain I would take even my pants off to walk in the water and push the car out to where I could dry out the distributor and spark plugs.
However, the visits to the country one teacher schools had a remarkable impact upon our own church life. Many of the boys and girls decided to come in of a Sunday and join with the parents at church. In the first year a non-existent Sunday School began to grow at a rapid rate until ten months later we had 107 children plus 19 teachers. As I look at the photograph of them all standing in their rows smiling I realize that so many of the children came to that Sunday School because I, first of all, went to them in their little one teacher schools. We started a mid-week boys club and before long 45 boys with eleven leaders were running an excellent programme. A girls club commenced and soon 36 girls and seven leaders were meeting the needs of those youth.
Other aspects of the church life also benefited. But those 107 children in the Sunday School and the girls and boys in the clubs, were a direct result of my concern to visit them first in the little one teacher schools at Moyston, Ross Bridge, Amphitheatre and Jacksons Creek.
I had learnt an important lesson, that if you expect people to come to the house of God, you first of all must visit them in the place where they live and work and go to school.
So I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES
