SCHOOLING

Most people interviewed were children during the Depression, so schooling featured in their memories and in a wide variety of ways from enthusiasm to indifference and bitterness.  Memories could arouse strong emotions and detailed recollection, or be a few scattered impressions hardly significant in the scheme of life afterwards. For many men the old adage that ‘school has nothing to do with education’ seemed to apply and it was viewed largely as a necessary evil. But more women seemed to gain a sense of identity and strength from their school days, particularly those who still retained friendships from their school days for the rest of their lives.

Norman Jones painted a bleak picture of his school days at Harbord Public School:

There were no uniforms required, no shoes were worn, especially by the boys. No library was available. Pupils contributed to buy a one-volume encyclopedia in sixth grade. Teachers were the only ones to wear watches – time was communicated by boys ringing a large bell in the playground. No fans or air conditioning. Most classrooms had a fireplace but these were only used on very, very cold days. Arithmetic was taught by singing the times tables each morning in the lower grade classes. All pupils were encouraged to wear shoes before they reached the sixth grade.

Walter Osborne recalls :

I remember one teacher in fifth class, he ’d been to World War 1 and we were studying History, World War 1, and he said: ‘We’ve read it in the textbook.’  I can still see him standing up there in the front, old Mr Marshall:  ‘You’ve read it in your text book and you know all about it. That’s what you’ve got to write on your papers in the exams. But now I was there and I’ll tell you what it was like.’… he thought war was a good place to be out of… he was one of the last men  off Gallipoli and he had a bullet wound went in one side of his neck and came out the other, a sniper’s bullet.

Dorothy Olsen had fonder memories of her school days:

School was absolutely wonderful I didn’t meet a little girl my own age until I started school and we could play games … oh this was a whole new world.

Arden Macpherson, who went to the Garden School run by the Theosophists, recalls:

… they had a large range and variety of pupils there and in a way it was a very unusual education because we were ground, literally ground in the classics and simply knew nothing at all about such things as science and arithmetic … So when I eventually left there at about nine or ten, I was a child wonder at classical things – Greek and Roman mythology, English history, art, you name it ... On the other hand I couldn’t add two and two.