JOLLY SCHOOL ON A TRAIN

Evening Star, Issue 20132, 23 March 1929, Page 20

JOLLY SCHOOL ON A TRAIN

• FORTY-TWO LITTLE SCHOLARS The newest way of providing a school is to turn a railway -carriage into a schoolroom and then take it by train from place to place where there are children but no school. This is being done in the part of Canada north of Lake Superior, a rocky land of woods and lakes, where the few people—woodmen and trappers—live near the railways. ■ The children are too

few to form a school permanently at iuiv place. They live' in little groups of "six or eight, each group many miles from the group nearest to it, and education for them all was impossible until the railway carriage school was thought °l. . The Canadian Pacific Ilailway has fitted up one of its finest passenger carriages so that hall of it 1 firms a schoolroom, with desks, blackboards, maps, and so on, and the other halt is the sleeping quarters and kitchen where the travelling schoolmaster lives. The school carriage is taken by passing trains to seven little settlements each month, and it stays at each place from two to four days, according to the number of scholars there. It has altogether forty-two pupils corning for lessons in the seven places, and their ages range from six to fiiteen years. It carries a library of 000 books tor the use of the older scholars and their parents. At first nine out of ten of the parents could neither write nor road English, and the boys and girls could only speak a few of its simplest words. Their native languages were French, Knmanian, Italian, nr Russian rather than English. Now they are all learning rapidly, and the best scholar, who has been given an eight days 1 holiday in Toronto as a prize, is lilllc Alex, ivlaileck, a Rumanian uui. i So successful is this school which travels to the children, teaches them for three or four days, and then gives them home lessons till it comes back three weeks later that the GovernorGeneral of Canada lias been to see it. At Christmas the railway carriage school becomes loaded with packages sent as gifts by kind-hearted folks to Jet the forty-two scholars know that other Canadians are thinking of them in their distant homos amid the snow. And well may these youngsters he remembered, lor they arc bent op getting all the knowledge they can get from the travelling school. Some of them have to trawl to meet it. For instance, David Clement and Arthur Clement, sons of a trapper, live in the forest, twenty miles from where the school stops, but that has not prevented them going to it. They have loaded a toboggan with provisions, a tent, and some traps, and have driven a dog team with the toboggan to the siding where the school carriage is. Then they have pitched their tent, hanked it round with green boughs, covered it thickly with snow, heated it with a stove, and lived in it all the winter, sometimes with the glass 50deg below zero, _ for the sake of three days of schooling each month. And they have done more than that, for •when the school was absent elsewhere, 1 and their home lessons were done before it returned, they had helped their widowed father by trapping more skins than will pay for their living and expenses. David Clement is twelve, and Arthur Clement is nine. There is an example! It bents everything we read in story books.