Gerald Francis John (‘Jack’) Dart was a teacher, educational philosopher and playwright who was Headmaster of Ballarat Grammar School in Victoria, Australia from 1942 until 1970. He was a founding Member of the Australian College of Education (MACE) and was listed in Who's Who in Australia.
Background
editOriginally from Nelson, New Zealand and educated at Nelson College, G.F.J. Dart completed Master of Arts degrees in both English and Latin at the University of New Zealand in Christchurch (now the University of Canterbury). While he was at university he wrote and produced the Canterbury University College Reviews.
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.
Views on education
editG.F.J. Dart held individualist views on education, which he expressed in plain English through speeches and various writings. His views meant that Ballarat Grammar sometimes avoided practices that were common in other schools.
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.
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.”
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.
The school’s cadet unit was disbanded during Dart’s headmastership, but it is not clear whether this was for philosophical or practical reasons.
Manual work and self-sufficiency
editAt 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.
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
editG.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
editAfter 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
edit- 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)