Timbertop: History

The topic that we have been given for this assessment is a quite broad subject, because of this I am going to be narrowing this down to the ideas that Kurt Hahn and Sir James Darling brought forth to Geelong Grammar School Timbertop and how throughout the history of the Schools Campus the changes that have happened to the Outdoor and Experiential learning side. The thinking behind my decision to reduce the subject down to one single stream was to express my own op

Darling’s vision of a bush extension school, unique in Australia at the time, was influenced by a number of factors. In the early 1950’s, the horrors of the Second World War were over and there was a great sense of a new beginning, of wanting to rebuild a world that would never again be caught up in such devastation. Against this background of incipient social change, three specific influences were at work: the traditions of Geelong Grammar itself; the growth of the healthy mind-spirit-body- movement in the context of Australian education; and the impact on Darling of the philosophy of the German educationist, Dr. Kurt Hahn, Headmaster of Gordonstoun in Scotland.

Hahn developed what he called the Salem method of education, so called because it was developed at Salem, the famous school that he founded in 1920 on the shores of Lake Constance in Germany, in a castle provided by his patron, Price Max of Baden, the last Imperial Chancellor. The Salem method was an assignment-based approach whereby students were encouraged to take responsibility for their own studies and, ultimately, their individual destinies.

The philosophy with which Timbertop was created in 1951 remains its driving force. Sir James Darling, then the Headmaster of Geelong Grammar School and the founder of Timbertop, wrote

“The theory of Timbertop was this: that adolescent boys could develop by themselves, out of the usual school machine. Placed in a different and less clement environment, they should undertake responsibility for themselves and be given the challenges of something like a man’s live under conditions that they had to conquer but the first principle was essentially one of self-reliance and the challenge to live up to this responsibility.”

Today Timbertop is a coeducational school and over the last Fifty-five years things have changed significantly though the underlying emphasis of Timbertop has