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<div style="border:1px solid; background-color:#ffdead;"> <div style="background-color:#000000; font color:#ffffff; margin-right:40px; margin-left:40px; line-height:1.5;"> <font color="#ffffff"> <big> For anyone wondering when I'll turn this page into something deserving the title "Wikipedia User Page", the answer is when I get the time. </big> </font> </div>
Gerald Francis John Dart was an Australian teacher, educational philosopher and playwright.
G.F.J. (‘Jack’) Dart was [[Headmaster]] of [[Ballarat Grammar School]] in [[Victoria]], [[Australia]] from [[1942]] until [[1970]]. He was a Member of the Australian College of Educators (MACE).
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==Background==
Current Projects I am involved with:
<font color="blue"> <center> <big> [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Judaism|WikiProject Judaism]] – [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub Sorting|WikiProject Stub Sorting]]
Originally from Nelson, New Zealand, G.F.J. Dart completed [[Master of Arts]] degrees in both English and Latin at the [[University of New Zealand]] where he wrote and produced the Canterbury University College Reviews.
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Dart began teaching at Cathedral Grammar School, Christchurch (1929-1934). While visiting England from 1936, he met Elizabeth Williams whom he married in 1939. After teaching at Anglewood School, Bowral (1938-1940), Dart went to Ballarat Grammar as Senior Master in 1941. He was Acting Headmaster in 1942 and appointed permanently in 1943.
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==Views on education==
<Hello. I am user [[wikibooks:User:E=MC^2|E=MC^2]] on [[wikibooks:Main Page|Wikibooks]] , and [[m:User:E=MC^2|E=MC^2]] on [[m:Main Page|meta]]. <s> I have decided to quit before I get into any major conflicts and end my involvement with Wikipedia. </s> I can't bring myself to leave forever, I'm too addicted!
==Wiki-Philosophies==
Dart held individualist views on education, which he expressed in [[plain English]] through speeches, articles, letters to editors and annual school reports. His views meant that Ballarat Grammar sometimes avoided practices that were common in other schools.
*I am an [[inclusionist]]. Every book by an important author and all books considered important deserve their own [[Wikipedia]] article. Would you like it if someone grouped you up with others, not giving you individual attention or ignored you like [[m:mergist|mergists]] or [[m:deletionists|deletionists]] want to do?
*I believe that [[WP:RFA|admin status]] is fine just the way it is. We do not need stricter or more lenient criteria at this time. (However, with more and more users becoming long term contributors, we may need more stringent rules.)
==Existence is…==
In 1944, for example, Dart oversaw the abolishment of the [[house system]], which he believed was divisive, creating artificially imposed factions within a school. Houses were not reinstated at the school until after Dart’s retirement, when one of the new boarders’ houses was named Dart House.
*[[The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything]]:
*"6 by 9."
*"42."
*"That's it. That's all there is."
==Things to do==
Dart also opposed formal team [[debating]], although he encouraged public speaking. In 1949, the year debating was discontinued at Grammar, he wrote, “We do not consider it desirable to encourage boys to argue for causes in which they do not believe.”
*Expand:
**[[Exodus (novel)|Exodus]]
In the mid-1960s it was the school’s policy to cap numbers at 450, something Dart supported in a 1964 address to Old Boys by outlining the advantages of smaller over larger institutions.
*Create:
**[[My name is Asher Lev]]
The school’s [[cadet]] unit was disbanded during Dart’s headmastership, but it is not clear whether this was for philosophical or practical reasons.
**[[In the Beginning (book)|In the Beginning]]
**[[The Promise]]
==Manual work and self-sufficiency==
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At the time of Dart’s headmastership, Ballarat Grammar was a small [[Church of England]] boys’ school of up to two hundred or so students, about half of them boarders from country towns and farms, especially in the [[Mallee]], [[Wimmera]] and [[Western District]] regions of Victoria.
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Dart was an active gardener who valued manual work. He encouraged students in outdoors projects and small farming enterprises which developed the school’s [[self-sufficiency]], for example by producing vegetables and eggs for the school kitchen. The school ran a piggery and at one stage kept two draught horses. In the early 1960s, some senior boys designed and built a students’ common room that later became the school’s library for a time, and from the mid-1960s students and teachers laid many square metres of brick paving around the school.
==Plays and playwriting==
G.F.J. Dart produced the school’s annual plays, choosing works by such writers as [[Shakespeare]], [[George Bernard Shaw]] and [[Christopher Fry]]. He also wrote several plays, including ‘My Last Duchess’, based on [[Robert Browning]] (1951); 'The Tower of Babel', produced for the Ballarat Begonia Festival (1959); and a parody of [[‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’]] entitled ‘The Summer of the 777th Billy-can’, performed in Ballarat at Her Majesty’s Theatre (1960).
==Retirement==
After G.F.J. Dart retired at the end of 1970, he and Mrs Dart lived in Queensland at Tallebudgerra on the Gold Coast hinterland.
==References==
* M.J.W. Boyle, Winds of Influence: A Short History of The Ballarat Grammar School 1911-1971 (n.d.)
* The Ballarat Grammarian, 1968-69
* Catherine Williamson, From Cowpatch to Rose Garden: The Memoirs of Kit Williamson, A History of Ballarat and Queens Anglican Grammar School 1941-1993, (1993)
* [http://www.hermaj.com/history/locals/nathistory4.htm Her Majesty’s Ballarat – 50 Golden Years: 1953-1960]
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