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As vital participants in their family's economic productivity, peasant children
were seldom encouraged to go to school.^* This attitude persisted among the
immigrants of the Colony, their offspring often pooriy represented among the regular
attenders of the govemment and Church mn schools of the 1860s and 1870s. In the
early years of the gold msh, most miners had displayed a low regard for the education
of their young, the Inspector of National Schools finding in 1854 that the men rarely
attended meetings to establish schools but always supported meetings regarding mining
licences and related matters. The miners were unwilling to part with as much as
threepence to support the building of a school, preferring their children to support
them in the search for gold. As for the Italian speakers, since most were either
unmarried, or intending to return to their families in Europe, few gave thought to the
education of the Colony's young. The difficulty of establishing schools was further
exacerbated by the continual movement of the miners from one goldfield to another
and the resultant dwindling of the tovm populations. The first schools, which were
erected in tents and moved with the diggers to each msh, were damp, ill-ventilated and
either too hot or too cold,^' Despite the problems, by the mid 1860s, they had become
a more permanent feature on the Daylesford landscape and children's attendance made
compulsory. National Schools were replaced by the Common Schools and then, in
1873, the State Schools came into being,'" Wherever there was a settlement, a school
was erected. The greater number and accessibility of schools did not, however,
encourage the attendance of the Italian speakers, whose parents needed them at home.
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