I never met Kurt Hahn before he died in 1974.  From the accounts I have read, he was bright, creative, idealistic, principled and extremely idiosyncratic.  As a Head of School, he used to sit with his elbows on the table when he spoke with people.  He was six foot tall and poorly co-ordinated, with a large ungainly body enveloped in a suit that was too big for him.  He walked with a stoop, head thrust forward with arms swinging.  As an adolescent in 1904, he had suffered from sunstroke, leaving him with a recurring disability all his life, and so he invariably wore a white Panama hat while outdoors.  He had a strongly accented German voice and a walk that the staff and the students at his school loved to imitate. 

Through his work to help establish Atlantic College in Wales (the first United World College), Kurt Hahn was one of the pivotal founders of the United World Colleges movement.  An extraordinarily innovative educator in his day (despite his own protests to the contrary), the UWC vision today largely springs from Kurt Hahn’s philosophy of education in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  As UWCs approach their 50th anniversary next year, there has been something of a renaissance of interest in Kurt Hahn, with more and more movement-wide documents referring to the inspiration, vision and legacy of this extraordinary educator.

The general story of Kurt Hahn is fairly well known to those of us in United World Colleges.  Born of Jewish parents in 1886 in Germany, the young Kurt Hahn studied at Oxford, Berlin, Heidelberg and Freiburg before being appointed as the Head of Salem School in southern Germany in 1920.  In 1933, he was forced to relinquish that position when he openly criticised the Nazi regime after witnessing the death of a young communist by storm troopers by kicking him to death, while forcing the young man’s mother to watch.

Hahn asked the faculty, students and alumni of Salem School to choose between Salem and Hitler, arguing that no-one could reconcile both.  In Hahn’s words: “This is a crisis that goes beyond politics.  Germany is at stake, her Christian civilization, her good name, her soldiers’ honour.   Salem cannot remain neutral.  I ask the members of the Salem Union who are active in the SA or SS to break with Salem or break with Hitler.”

As a result of this open opposition, Hahn was imprisoned, and was released only when a appeal from the British Prime Minister secured his release on the condition that he was exiled from Germany.  Hahn thus moved to the UK, where he founded Gordonstoun School, and remained Head there until 1953.  During his time in the UK, he converted to Christianity, founded Outward Bound, Round Square, Atlantic College [and UWC] and the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme.

Like the Heads of several other UWCs have done recently, I spent some time at Wednesday’s staff meeting this week focussing on Kurt Hahn’s relevance to UWCs today.  I began by comparing Kurt Hahn’s views on education to those of one of his educational contemporaries, AS Neill.

In many ways, Hahn and Neill led parallel lives.  Both were dissatisfied with traditional schooling, and tried to develop alternative and innovative educational models to address their concerns.  They both founded residential schools in Germany, and later in Britain within ten years of each other.  Neill fled Germany because of local resistance to his ideas, whereas Hahn was forced to flee Germany because of his opposition to the growth of Nazism.  Both came to symbolise distinctively different approaches to progressive education in the 20th century.

As I shared with the staff on Wednesday, both believed that the problematic teenager possesses good qualities that are suppressed by conventional education and upbringing.

For Hahn the troublesome child is the result of high spirits and the will to achieve being given insufficient outlet; the cure lies in the opportunities for challenge inherent in outdoor education.

For Neill, delinquency is the result of moralising adults’ assault on the sexual and playful instincts of childhood; the cure is to give repressed instincts full rein by removing adult coercion and disapproval.

Hahn’s teacher is the person who facilitates a structured process of experiential learning; Neill’s is the therapist allowing the child to ‘live out’ his problems.

Thus, Neill granted high levels of freedom and independence as a right because he believed it was a precondition for the growth of self-discipline.  On the other hand, Hahn believed that increased personal freedoms must be a response as individuals displayed evidence of greater maturity.

Despite his philosophical approach, Hahn never regarded his schools as especially innovative, and indeed he argued that they should not be so.  He believed that his ideas were not very original, but were simply were drawn from many other great thinkers.  It was the “living” of ideas, of experiencing and implementing them for yourself, that were so important to him.  He once told this story to make the point:

1. An American friend once asked me, “What are you proudest of in your beautiful schools?”  I answered, “I am proudest of the fact that there is nothing original in them; it is stolen from everywhere, from the Boy Scouts, the British Public Schools, from Plato, from Goethe.” Then the American said, “But oughtn’t you aim at being original?”.  I answered, “In medicine, as in education, you must harvest the wisdom of a thousand years.  If you ever come across a surgeon who wants to take out your appendix in the most original manner possible, I strongly advise you to go to another surgeon.”
   

There are some people in United World Colleges who assert that over the past half century, UWCs have drifted away from Kurt Hahn’s vision and now may be closer to AS Neill’s philosophy.  The aim of my session at last Wednesday’s staff meeting was to begin an exploration to ascertain whether or not this might be true at LPCUWC.

As a stimulus, I distributed a sheet with a number of Kurt Hahn’s quotes (or words attributed to him), and I asked teachers to break into small groups and identify the 10 words that they felt best described the attributes in students that Kurt Hahn wished to develop.

I won’t spoil the fun by telling you their answers - it would be much more interesting for you to read Hahn’s quotes and develop your own list of the 10 words that YOU feel best describe the characteristics of students that Hahn saw as important.  In doing so, hopefully you may gain insight into the great mind of Kurt Hahn:

1. •The world is not ruined by the wickedness of the wicked but by the weakness of the good [Hahn took this from Napoleon].
   

2. •There are three ways of trying to win the young. You can preach at them—that is a hook without a worm. You can say, "You must volunteer"—that is of the devil.  And you can tell them, "You are needed"—that appeal hardly ever fails.
   

3. •Neither the love of man nor the love of God can take deep root in a child that does not know aloneness....Training for expeditions should give young people the experience of being alone. We need to counteract the confused restlessness of modern life and the insatiable appetite for company it engenders.
   

4. •The product of a good nursery is unsurpassed in human strength. There is a quickened sense of justice, there is delight in truth. There is a power of sympathy that has the strength of a primitive instinct. There is an untiring spirit of enterprise. There is perseverance and alertness in curiosity.
   

5. •It is a sin of the soul to force young people into opinions – indoctrination is of the devil – but is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.
   

6. •I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all compassion.
   

7. •Rewards that are worthwhile come from the experience of contributing to a worthwhile enterprise. We need to be modest in our achievements. The greatest privilege is to give service to others and this needs no recognition or reward since we are the greatest beneficiaries. We learn more about ourselves from this act than give benefit to others.
   

8. •Education must enable young people to effect what they have recognised to be right, despite hardships, despite dangers, despite scepticism, despite boredom and despite mockery from the world.
   

9. •Expeditions can greatly contribute towards building strength of character. Joseph Conrad [in Lord Jim] tells us that it is necessary for a youth to experience events that reveal the inner worth of the man, the edge of his temper, the fibre of his stuff, the quality of his resistance, the secret truth of his pretenses not only to himself but others.
   

10. •Dr. Zimmerman [was correct] in saying it is less important to develop the innate strength in a person than to make him overcome his innate weakness. Your disability is your opportunity.
    

11. •Training through the body, not training of the body....Let us build up physical fitness for the sake of the soul [Dr. Zimmerman and Plato inspired].
    

12. •One school master [at Salem] made the remark ‘I have no faith in this boy’. Dr Reinhardt said to him ‘then you have no right to educate him.’
    

13. •An eminent man challenged me to explain what sailing could do for international education. I replied that we had an application for a future king of an Arabic country to enter Gordonstoun and we have several Jewish students. If the Arab and Jewish students were to sail together, in a north easterly gale, and get thoroughly sea sick together, I would have done something for international education.
    

14. •People blame the rise in juvenile crime on a lack of parental control and leniency of the law. But some of us educators say that ours is the guilt, ours is the greatest guilt.
    

15. •The experience of helping a fellow person in danger, or even the training in a realistic manner to give this help, tends to change the balance of power in a youth’s inner life with the result that compassion can become the master motive.
    

16. •There is no doubt that today [written in 1965] you are surrounded by what I call tempting declines. I will mention six of them. The decline of physical fitness due to modern methods of transport, skill and care due to weakened craftsmanship, imagination and memory due to the confused restlessness of modern life, the disease of spectatoritis, the decline of self-discipline and above all the decline in compassion.
    

17. •Research projects can lead to the discovery of intellectual reserves which examinations often fail to mobilise.
    

18. •The fight against unnecessary death and suffering releases the highest dynamics of the human soul even more so than war.
    

19. •You cannot overestimate the power of self deception.