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Volume VII, Issue No.7
In This Issue: Our Roots in Outward Bound
Oh,
that’s where that principle comes from!
Emily Cousins: How did you get the idea for an expedition on Kurt Hahn? Carol Carlson: We were at a planning institute last summer, and we were talking about school culture and how we could turn our culture around, because we seemed to be having some problems with the students’ behavior and respect. It seemed like a shame that our children didn’t know the design principles. They were beginning to understand expeditions and fieldwork, but they didn’t really have a language. So, as a staff, we decided to do a whole-school expedition on school culture. In the course of the planning institute, I read an article on Kurt Hahn called, "The Only Mountain Worth Climbing," by Thomas James. It was a wonderful introduction for me; I felt like I knew Hahn. He was so central to Expeditionary Learning that I was amazed that we hadn’t been exposed to him before. I came back the next day and said, "Well, we are going to focus on Kurt Hahn." I decided to hone in on the amazing fact that Hahn stood up to Hitler. I thought that would make a nice contrast between two figures whose lives intersected at a very important time. The children had not studied the Holocaust at all and had only a surface notion of Hitler. We wanted to deepen this so that it meant something to the children to say Kurt Hahn stood up to Hitler. We started focusing on Hitler through our writing. My student teacher selected three excerpts from a documentary that showed Hitler’s magnetism. It made the children ask the classic question about Hitler: Why did people follow him? We brought in a lot of books, and they researched his life and wrote character analyses. We made rubrics for their work that really challenged them, and we emphasized the culture of revision. They worked very hard on them, and for some children it was the best thing they had ever written. For literature, we chose The Night Crossing by Karen Ackerman, which tells the story of a family who sells everything and travels over the mountains from Austria to Switzerland. We also read Snow Treasure by Marie Swigan, which is a Norwegian tale of how children rescue the town’s gold from being stolen by the Nazis. We also selected Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry. It was the first time I gave all of the children the choice of which book to read. In the past I would have chosen Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, which is a more challenging book, but I wanted to see if, by keeping the groups heterogeneous, we could really enrich the experience. It worked.
Cousins: How did it make a difference? Carlson: I worked with a group that was reading The Night Crossing. The book tells the story of a fleeing family who travels at night and looks for barns to camp in during the day. At one point, the family asks a farmer’s wife to give them food, and as she is considering it, she notices that one of the girls has a nice bracelet. The girl pretends that it is very special and valuable, and that makes the woman want it all the more, and she agrees to give them food in exchange for the bracelet. If I had had all of the poor readers in that group, I think they would have thought that the girl was sad because she lost a nice bracelet, and their interpretation would have stopped there. They would not have seen the manipulation. By having readers in there who were more savvy, it enriched the whole discussion. We had a debate. Did she do it on purpose or not? What can we find in the book that would show that she did it on purpose? I could see all these other readers were suddenly making connections. The mixed groups also gave some of the sixth graders who are poor readers a chance to read with really good readers. They chose Number the Stars and read with the students who are sort of the elite who read these nice, big books. That group, too, was a very rich experience for those children. Cousins: How did students start learning about Hahn? Carlson: I didn’t want to introduce Hahn until they had a good picture of Hitler. As the students were finishing their Hitler essays, I read excerpts of the article about Hahn by Thomas James. We also read summaries of Hahn’s life that had beencompiled at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver. As we learned about his life, we had the design principles posted in the back, and students would turn around and say, "Oh, that’s where that principle comes from." We talked about Hahn’s love of mountain climbing, and students would say, "That’s why the natural world is so important." It was wonderful to see them perk up and realize that there was a person behind this design. When they learned about Hahn’s heat stroke, and the depression and loss of sight that followed, they said, "That’s solitude and reflection and success and failure." They really mined the design principles and saw how this man’s life gave rise to them. They began to know Kurt Hahn. When we got to the part in his life when he wrote a letter to the alumni of his school in Germany called Salem asking them to stand up against Hitler, they really knew what it meant because they had studied Hitler. They had learned the backdrop, and they could see that Hahn was a person who really believed in all of these wonderful things.
Cousins: What was it like when Josh Miner came to tell your students about when he worked with Hahn and brought Outward Bound to the United States? Carlson: It was wonderful. One little girl came up to me and she said, "You know, I wonder if I shake hands with him, if it would be like shaking hands with Kurt Hahn." He told the students stories about Hahn and about service projects like the student fire brigades. Service had been something we did as an add-on to our expeditions; we hadn’t really focused on service. When the students learned from their research and from Mr. Miner that Gordonstoun teenagers actually acted as the fire department for their village, they were amazed. It opened their eyes. After Josh Miner visited and the students finished their essays on Hahn, the students made four- or eight-frame comic strips that zeroed in on one aspect of Josh Miner, Hitler, or Kurt Hahn. The work was wonderful; we displayed it in the halls. More than anything, these strips enabled the children to see how it all fit together. Cousins: After the students learned about Hahn, do you think it changed their relationship to the principles?
Carlson: Definitely. After that, when students got into an argument, I would just stop and say, "Let’s look back at the design principles and see if we can find one that might help us." Everybody would then plug right in. They would discuss how different principles could be applied to the situation. Cousins: How do you think studying Hahn helped that? Carlson: It gave the students a human face. There is nothing like a personal relationship with a real human being of such stature to draw people in. They were riveted by his life. Studying the design principles without the person would not have had the same effect. They could see his life as the embodiment of specific principles. It was a turning point for our school. I really think that our students are now grounded in those design principles. Cousins: When I spoke with your teaching partner Gladys Graham, she said that learning about Hahn helped the students make sense of why the teachers and the schools are asking them to buy into the design principles. Do you think that’s true? Carlson: Yes, I do. I think they understood, for the first time, that those were values. They weren’t just words on a paper that had been up in the room for three years and nobody paid attention to them. These were things that changed people’s lives, and I do think that they understood why we wanted them to use them—not just learn them and memorize them, but actually use them they as a source of inspiration.
You can find a printing of "The Only Mountain Worth Climbing," by Thomas James, in Fieldwork, Volume I (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1995)
Born in 1886, Hahn was the second of four sons in a Jewish family in Berlin. Schooled with conventional German rigor at the Wilhelms Gymnasium, he graduated in 1904, the year in which he experienced a sunstroke that left him with a recurring disability for the rest of his life. Hahn went on to Oxford from 1904 to 1906 to read classics, with the support of his father, Oskar Hahn, industrialist and anglophile.Oe [Called home to Germany by World War I, Hahn took a position in the German Foreign Office where he advocated for a negotiated peace in Western Europe. After the war, Hahn became the personal secretary to Prince Max von Baden, Germanyis last imperial chancellor. In 1920, Hahn opened the Salem School in a section of the Princeis ancestral castle.] At the urging of Prince Max, he incorporated egalitarian aims into the design of the school; while Salem naturally attracted the children of the wealthy, it also made space for, and actively sought, less privileged students. Emulating the Cistercian monks who had inhabited the castle for many centuries, the students and teachers at Salem School helped the surrounding communities through various forms of service, including a fire brigade. The curriculum at Salem prepared young people for higher education, but not without laying the groundwork for a life of moral and civic virtue, the chief aims of the school. Among the unusual assumptions underlying all forms of instruction at Salem was Hahnis conviction that students should experience failure as well as success. They should learn to overcome negative inclinations within themselves and prevail against all adversity. He believed, moreover, that students should learn to discipline their own needs and desires for the good of the community. They should realize through their own experience the connection between self-discovery and service. He also insisted that true learning required periods of silence and solitude as well as directed activity. Each day the students took a silent walk to commune with nature and revitalize their power of reflection. OeAn assassin failed to end Hahnis life in 1923. Still in his early thirties, the schoolmaster was controversial, a gadfly, a target because he was a moral leader far beyond the lives of his students and teachers.Oe As the Nazis rose to power, the director of Salem School became an outspoken opponent. In 1932 a group of fascist storm troopers kicked a leftist activist to death before the eyes of his mother. Adolph Hitler immediately praised the action of his followers. Kurt Hahn wrote to the alumni of Salem, telling them to choose between Salem and Hitler. A man who knew Hahn at the time called it "the bravest deed in cold blood that I have ever witnessed." When he became chief of state in 1933, Hitler imprisoned Hahn. Fortunately for the embattled educator, he still had friends in Britain who remembered his idealism and his hopes for friendship between the two nations. Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and others helped to arrange for Hahnis release and timely emigration to England in 1933. Within a year of his arrival, Kurt Hahn started another institution, Gordonstoun, which became one of Britainis most distinguished progressive schools and served as a model for similar schools in other countries. In the following decades, Hahnis educational vision served as the moving spirit for new institutions and programs of worldwide renown: the Moray Badge and County Badge Schemes and their successor, the Duke of Edinburgh Awards; Outward Bound; the Trevelyan Scholarships; and the United World Colleges.
My second accusation against our system of education is this: it fails to introduce activities into a boyis life like to make him discover his powers as a man of action. At the beginning of this war we experienced a remarkable change in the young. Every ounce of their human strength was claimed; the light of enterprise and daring was lit in their faces, and some of these young soldiers confessed to me that they felt a great release from their former existence "which hardly could be called life". I refuse to arrange a world war in every generation to rescue the young from a depressing peace. Let us rather plan their life at school so that they can discover and test their hidden powers. Education has no nobler task than to provide "the moral equivalent to war," as L.P. Jacks has told us 25 years ago. That this task can be fulfilled nobody will doubt, who has seen the triumph of mastery in a boyis face when he is conquering adversities on a sailing or mountaineering expedition. The present Headmaster of Eton has called such victories "conquests without the humiliation of the conquered." I have often shown the Gordonstoun (or Salem) Final Report form to teachers at Secondary Schools. [See box]. Invariably I am told with a shrug of the shoulders: How can we recognize these traits of character within the curriculum laid down for our schools? My reply is: you cannot; unless you revolutionize your timetable to contain activities which reveal, test and train character and in which you and your colleagues take an active part. I recommend that training under sail or training in mountain craft be recognized as character building activities good for the future worker, soldier, clerk, scholar, business man, lawyer or doctor. I may mention, here, that formerly the famous Banking House of Wallenberg demanded that their future partners were trained at sea. Inland schools should combine to have a training home on the hills or at the sea, in which short courses are held, modeled on the example of the Outward Bound Sea School. I also plead that more schools are planted near the sea. A National Trust tenderly watches over castles and churches of the past. There is no more sacred treasure of a nation than the human nature of its citizens. We are not protecting this treasure against decay. It is our educational system that is failing in this duty at protection, wasting the unique opportunities with which this island is blessed. He who demands much from the young commands their willing service.
My first teaching assignments at Gordonstoun included general science, current events, and what we would call a "remedial class" in arithmetic. The latter group was my first hands-on exposure to Hahnis working principle that a boy was not to be penalized for a deficiency over which he had no control. Two factors that should not prevail in denying admission to the school were a familyis inability to pay and a boyis low IQ. The important question was: What is the boy doing with his endowment? Many Gordonstoun students did splendidly in the university examinations. We also had some interesting youngsters who were far from what would be considered academically qualified at most British or American schools. Those boys in my special class were just about mathematically illiterate. Many of these lads had endured the bombing in the Battle of Britain, and undoubtedly some had suffered traumas. Emotional disturbances, manifested in such aberrations as bed-wetting, were then common among young Britishers. But in that arithmetic class was a socially powerful youngster who would win a place of leadership among the students. Another would become a master farmer, the greatest growerof tomatoes under glass in Great Britain; academia did not come easily for him, but he had fine common sense. A third was an artist, a genius in stained-glass design. There were sons of bricklayers in the school who had aspirations different from their fathersi, and there were others who intended also to be bricklayers. Both were equally honored. Hahn hoped the latter would go back into their world better bricklayers because they were better citizens. There were boys who were going to sea; their careers in the merchant service had already been chosen for them. They were honored at the same level as somebody destined for a university to become a doctor. It was a part of Hahnis greatness as a headmaster that he gave youngsters a sense of being members of a community in which all had the same opportunity to earn the same kind of respect from their peers. At the same time he was on the alert for any kind of lateral shift an individual might develop. Here comes, say, a youngster who has a genius for working in stained glass butwhose academic tickets are subpar. He is exposed to poetry and drama and music, and perhaps he will be enthused by one of these. Also he is exposed to competing with others from other streams in a political sense, in the school governing structure. That could hardly happen to him if as aconsequence of the Eleven Plus [exam] he had been diverted into a vocational stream. The Break Another of my early responsibilities was The Break. It was essential, in Hahnisthinking, that a healthy youngster "have his powers of resilience, coordination, acceleration, and endurance purposefully developed." The Break was his unique contribution to physical education. Hehad invented it in the early Salem days, and from the beginning had made it an imperative part of the Gordonstoun scheme. Four mornings a week, during a fifty-minute break in what Hahn called "the sedentary hours," each boy took part in two of a half-dozen events—sprinting or distance running, long or high jumping, discus or javelin throwing. He competed only against himself, trying to better his previous best performance. The frail youngster who broke ten feet in the long jump for the first time in his life got as big a cheer as the track team star beating his previous mark at close to twenty. Every boy had to do every event. That same star jumper might be a dud at throwing the discus. It was as important to overcome a weakness as to develop a strength. When I was put in charge of The Break, I became a fascinated witness to its remarkable results. It was not just that the average performance would have put the average American schoolboy to shame. The great satisfaction lay in seeing the physical duffer discover that, through trying from day to day, he could do much better than he would have dared to dream. He had learned, in Hahnis phrase, to "defeat his defeatism." You could see him shed—Hahn again— "the misery of his unimportance." His newfound confidence would carry over into his peer relationships, his classroom performance, the quality of work on his project. It was not unusual for a timid or sensitive boy with an underdeveloped physique to emerge from the chrysalis of his underconfidence a competent athlete, surprised to find himself confirming what the headmaster had so often told the school: "Your disability is your opportunity." Hahn as School Leader However tight the dayis schedule, [Hahn] found time to reconnoiter about the school. "A headmasteris job," he said, "is to walk around." His antennae were always out, fine-tuned and waving, probing for each ladis potential strengths that they might be developed, for his innate weaknesses that they might be overcome. Repeatedly he honed in on some shielded aspect of a boyis ego that others had missed and that cast a suddenlight on deviant behavior. He was his own psychologist, drawing on a vast bank of observations. Periodically, roused from slumber by his call, four or five of us—housemaster, teachers, activity leader—would make our way through the night to his study. The call would have but one meaning—some boy was in trouble. Perhaps a student had been caught stealing. Hahn would have spent a long evening getting the report, talking with the boy and with thestudent leaders who knew him best. Conscious of the contrast between our disheveled aspects and his neat daytime attire, we would wait for him to stop pacing the floor and tell us why we were there. Finally, when he had given us the facts, came the inevitable dreaded question, the blue eyes boring in: "Josh! When did you first notice this boy was in difficulty, and what did you do about it?"—dreaded because one had sensed and done nothing. When a boy was in danger of expulsion at Gordonstoun, it was not he but the adult community who was on trial. A boy steals because he has some deeper trouble. If one is sensitive enough, if one cares enough, one can detect symptoms of the trouble early, when there may still be time for remedy.
War broke out. The British Army commandeered Gordonstoun, and the school had to trek to wartime quarters in Wales. The move was a major disability. In it Hahn found a new opportunity—and brought forth Outward Bound. Opportunityis name was Lawrence Holt. Hahn had been trying to launch a "County Badge Scheme," an ambitious national plan for fostering physical fitness, enterprise, tenacity, and compassion among British youth. But in the wartime climate his prestigious County Badge Experimental Committee—scientist Julian Huxley, historian George Trevelyan, and others—had made small headway. At that same time Holt, a Gordonstoun father and Hahn admirer who was partner in Alfred Holt & Company, a large merchant-shipping enterprise, was gravely concerned about the human toll in the Battle of the Atlantic. He was convinced that due to faulty training, many seamen on torpedoed merchant ships were dying unnecessarily. Unlike sail-trained old-timers, he maintained, the younger men and youths had not acquired a sense of wind and weather, a reliance on their own resources, and a selfless bond with their fellows. "I would rather," he told Hahn, "entrust the lowering ofa lifeboat in mid-Atlantic to a sail-trained octogenarian than to a young sea technician who is competently trained in the modern way but has never been sprayed by salt water." Hahn proposed they join forces to start a new kind of school offering young people one-month courses that would use Hahnis county badge scheme to implement Holtis quest for training to turn attitudes around. Holt agreed, his company providing funds and the maritime staff members. The school, called Outward Bound at Holtis insistence, opened at Aberdovey, Wales, in 1941. It was not, as the mythologized version has it, a school for young merchant seamen. While many of the students were youngsters sponsored by Holtis Blue Funnel Line and other shipping companies and from the government training ship H.M.S. Conway, others were apprentices sent by industry, or police, fire, and other cadets, or boys on leave from their regular schools or about to go into the armed services. It was Holt himself who articulated a Hahnian concept in words Hahn never forgot. "The training at Aberdovey," Holtsaid, "must be less a training for the sea than through the sea, and so benefit all walks of life." The month-long course was, in fact, a mix of small-boat training, athletic endeavor to reach standards of competence, cross-country route-finding by map and compass, rescue training, an expedition at sea, a land expedition across three mountain ranges, and service to the local people. Although beset by a prodigious series of start-up difficulties, Outward Bound worked from the first. The youths who came were the products of Britainis dozen years of depression and dole. Invariably, when they were told what they were expected to achieve in thirty days, murmurs of incredulity and derision ran through the group. But they were soon caught up by "the magic of the puzzle," Hahnis odd phrase for the phenomenon he knew so well—that when a young person "defeats his defeatism" to meet a challenge, it primes him to try for still more difficult achievement. There was a half-concealed pride of accomplishment in the assertion of the Cockney boy, exhausted and footsore after his first cross-country effort: "Cor blimey, if this had been Larndon, theyid shift them bleedini hills." A moving human story underlay the statement of the lad from Liverpool, warmed by his watch-matesi acclaim for his self-improvement: "This is the first time in my life I have seemed to matter." Wise old Alec Fraser, the former missionary who served as the school chaplain, saw what was happening: "They come for the wrong reasons, and they leave sorry for the right ones that itis over."
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