A Farm School Experiment in Australia Two years before the war, a party of 35 destitute boys from England landed in Western Australia. They were taken by the Child' Emigration Society, which was founded by Oxford Undergraduates in 1909, to the Farm School, educated and trained under the healthiest and happiest of conditions, and they are now out in employment on the land, and are all doing exceedingly well:
The war stopped the emigration of further parties, but now it is hoped. to re-establish the Farm School and to send out this year a hundred of our poorest boys and a hundred of our poorest girls and give them, after the necessary education and training, a similar chance to earn an honourable living.
Mr. Kingsley Fairbridge, one of the enthusiastic founders' of the Society and headmaster of its Farm School, is now in England collecting funds for, the project. In an interview with a represent ive of! the "Observer" he gave an account. of the arrival and progress of the first party of children.
young Western Australian journalist," he said, came with me to the} boat to meet this first party. Presently we saw them coming down the gangway. 'Good Heavens,' he exclaimed, " these are not your children, are they? They have sent you the wrong class of child! They were typical slum children and looked after a ren and desirable. '© years later the it long sea-journey anything but, instead same journalist came to see how they were getting on. He wrote a eulogistic article in which he remarked 'Western Australia needs' tens of thousands of children of this class.'
What had happened in the meantime to work so wonderful a change? Mr. Fairbridge explained that the boys had received the ordinary elementary education provided by the Government, and that after school hours they had learned to look after their cottages, to make their beds, to keep themselves clean, to play football and cricket (which none of them knew when they went out), to swim, ride, and shoot, and a certain amount of the theory and practice of agriculture.
The theory Mr. Fairbridge considers very important, be cause, he said, "'it teaches the boys to understand, and therefore, to enjoy: their work. When they left the school not one of them went into a city. They all took up some form of farming. Two who were. old enough came to Europe for the war. Both have since returned to} Western Australia one being now a farm contractor in partnership with another old Farm School boy.
"The Society does not believe in crowding the children together or in locking up money in expensive buildings. It prefers to build wooden cottages, each of which
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.