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DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS
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Africa, which until lately have made pastoral farming the main industry of the country. The abnormally large extent of country necessary to carry a given amount of stock had led to farms being placed far apart, and thus to the creation of very small towns at the furthest limit from one another which would allow the farmers to dispose of their produce and to complete their marketings in a reasonable time. Thus, while schools could easily be provided in such villages—often distant thirty or forty miles from one another—it was a task of extreme difficulty for Government to extend any sort of educational help to farmers living at a distance from centres of population. Within a few years of the beginning of the permanent British occupation, it was proposed to send four itinerant teachers to the remote and thinly-inhabited districts of which Somerset East was then a type. In the second half of the century under consideration, the railway lines began to be a chief factor in determining larger aggregations of population, and the undenominational day-schools of Cape Colony fell into three classes, corresponding to the range of education appropriate to towns, villages, and country parts. Indeed, so dominant became the influence of the railways that a distinct class of schools under railway management sprang into existence. To these centres of instruction were transported, free of cost, not only the children of the gangers and other employés, but also the sons and daughters of Dutch farmers living near the railway line. One other class of schools in sparsely-populated areas deserves to be mentioned here, namely, district boarding-schools. Rough lodging and a teacher were provided in certain places where boys could not get to school on other terms. As a rule they brought with them some of their food, and returned home at the end of each week's instruction. But in spite of these and other devices, the problem of dealing adequately with the instruction of a country population possessing so few natural means of communication remains as yet unsolved.