Written by DOMINIQUE HERMAN
“I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that he was more than 30 years ahead of his time in his understanding of primary school children and how they learn,” said Shirley Kaminer at the memorial service for Jim Goodacre, the beloved former principal of Herzlia Constantia Primary. Kaminer was Jim’s deputy.
Tony Steward, a teacher at Wynberg Boys’ Junior School who was a pupil when Goodacre was its deputy headmaster, described Jim bringing a video camera into the classroom before television arrived in South Africa. “It was just one of the ways he was so innovative in his teaching methods,” he said. Jim wrote the lyrics for the school song for Wynberg Boys’ Junior and High – described by Steward as “a massively unifying force”. It’s been sung weekly for 41 years.
After his sudden resignation from Wynberg Boys, Jim looked for a position in a private school. “I knew of Herzlia, but I didn’t even consider it because, I thought, ‘It’s a Jewish school; they’re not going to want people that are not Jewish’,” he said in an interview in 2020 ahead of the closure of Herzlia Constantia. Years later, he discovered that parents at the school had petitioned the UHS to appoint him to the role when Mike Pincus left as principal.
He attributed his Herzlia school career to “a chance meeting that just completely changes your life”. That chance meeting occurred at an inter-school English conference in KZN. Shortly after he resigned from Wynberg, Herzlia Weizmann’s then principal, Stan Lifschitz, contacted him to set up an exploratory chat. “It was like talking to somebody exactly on the same wavelength,” Jim said.
In 1979, Pincus started as principal of Herzlia Constantia on the same day Jim began as deputy. Jim became principal in 1984, “thereby achieving his ambition of heading his own school”, said his son, Peter Goodacre, at the memorial. “Those were 19 extremely happy years,” Peter added.
“He was the most progressive educator that we have come across,” Kaminer said. “He not only encouraged creativity in the children but also in the teachers, and we all became better educators because of him.” Irene Berman, the mother of three Herzlia alumni (one of whom, Benjamin, is the deputy principal of Weizmann), said that Jim “not only educated our children, but also us parents”.
“I really believe,” Jim said in 2020, “and this is really the heart of my, I’ll call it, philosophy of primary school education, that children who
are happy and laughing at school do very much better than those children who don’t like coming to school because it’s a miserable place.”
James George Goodacre was born on June 7, 1933, in England. He died in Cape Town on June 11, 2025.
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