Kurt Hahn and Experiential Education

Admin building, Gordonstoun School, Scotland

This July I had the great pleasure of spending several hours in the Archive Library at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was Kurt Hahn’s second school, dating back to the time of his exile to Britain from Germany in the 1930s.

The challenge of a library is how to find one’s way in. In the case of Gordonstoun, the literal path is through the front arch of the Round Square building then up some stairs to the main library - quaintly monastic with it’s raw wooden beams and thick stone walls - and through a rear door to a room which feels every bit like a chapel. 

The intellectual path is the more challenging. The archive is a forest of documents and memorabilia and the fear is that hours can be spent exploring one small region while other, more dramatic spaces, will be missed. Without a plan, you might walk in circles or find that you visit only the most well-trod routes and fail to discover something unique. So I began my navigation with a quote from Hahn, ‘The Moray Firth is my best school master,” and  the hope that I might learn more about his vision for experiential education by navigating a path through his writings about the sailing program.

The Moray Firth is the body of water closest to Gordonstoun; it’s where the school has always kept it’s sailing boats. Today they’re sleek fibreglass ocean-cruising yachts; in the 1930s they were a series of wooden boats traditionally rigged and every bit as capable as their modern counterparts. Hahn’s assertion that the Moray Firth is his most capable teacher is a statement about experiential education. It’s a statement about the power of challenge and a well-crafted learning environment and, for me, it’s a reminder that “the teacher” can be much more than just a person. 

I know from my time working in a number of Kurt Hahn organisations how central experiential education is to his vision. I have been an Outward Bound instructor in Australia, a teacher at Woodleigh School (a Round Square school in Australia) and my present teaching role is at the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore. In each of these organisations outdoor education is more than just an extra-curricular activity, it is central to the curriculum and intentionally designed to shape young minds in specific ways. Where classrooms teach knowledge, skills and understandings, experiential education focusses more on dispositions and attitudes that allow an individual to make something of themselves. 

One discovery in the archive that highlights Hahn’s focus on learning beyond academics is this 1950’s report template.

Notice the relatively small space allocated to English, Maths and other academic subjects. Achievement in each of these areas is represented by only a grade. More considerable space and teacher effort is devoted to describing dispositions like “public spirit” and “ability to plan”. In the Australian curriculum these dispositions are known as Capabilities, in the IB they’re the Approaches to Learning and in the UWCSEA curriculum we call them Skills and Qualities. The desire to teach and report on dispositions is still important in contemporary education, but it certainly isn’t front and centre in the way that it was for Kurt Hahn. 

In contemporary education we have elevated grades to give them a declarative authority beyond other professional teacher judgements. The apparatus of academic assessment - particularly Grade 12 exams - creates a social authority (in sociology this mechanism is called allocation) that often gives grades precedence over other forms of judgement. What Kurt Hahn’s 1950s report format does is balances the weight of judgements differently. It says, as much by its format as by its words, that how we act is more significant than what we know.

In the 1950s when WWII was in near memory, the need to find balance between knowledge and actions must have been pressing. Gordonstoun, like all schools at the time, was a very changed place with many of its teachers having seen active service and some of its staff not having returned from the war. Academic achievement must have seemed less impressive and less pressing when it was personal actions like planning and ability to manage hardship which were keeping people alive and winning battles a few years before. 

This is simplistic, of course. Not far away on the coast of Scotland are the remains of the early RADAR installations which were critical to defence in the the Battle of Britain. WWII was a technological war as much as it was a war of human values and technical knowledge was as much a weapon as determination. But in the 1950s, agency and human dispositions must have seemed very much at the fore of educational thought at Gordonstoun as this report format shows.

Which brings me back to sailing. The story of the Gordonstoun boys sailing the Prince Louis down to Wales during WWII has an important place in the mythology of Outward Bound and we have used this story in our Grade 6 curriculum at UWCSEA East. In summary, when Gordonstoun’s location on the coast of Scotland became too dangerous during the war, the decision was taken to relocate to a safer location in Wales. Most of the school population travelled down by train but a small group of boys sailed down as crew of the school boat, Prince Louis. Over several weeks they sailed down the Caledonian Canal to the West coast of Scotland and through the Irish sea to Wales. They spent several days disoriented in the Irish sea and eventually fell in with a Merchant Navy convoy coming in from the Atlantic. The seamanship and personal qualities of the boys who crewed for this voyage played a part in convincing benefactors of the value of the Outward Bound movement which Kurt Hahn founded soon after.

As I discovered in the Gordonstoun Archives, sailing was a central part of the learning program at all of the Schools that Kurt Hahn built - Salem, Gordonstoun, and UWC Atlantic. I think it was the challenge and camaraderie of sailing that Hahn valued. He wrote that:

an eminent man challenged me to explain what sailing in a schooner could do for international education. In reply, I said we had at that moment the application before us for a future king of an Arab country to enter Gordonstoun. I happened to have at the school some Jews...If the Arab and one of these Jews were to go out sailing on our schooner. . .perhaps in a Northeasterly gale, and if they were become thoroughly seasick together, I would have done something for international education.

It’s hard to quantify the value of experiential education. In the world where I live and teach, it often feels as if money is the best security - that economic prosperity is what will make the world safe - and that is perhaps partly true. Grades on academic subjects are a way that we allocate positions at universities which lead to higher paying jobs and a greater possibility of financial security. 

I think, however, that security meant something different to Hahn and the post-war generation. For Hahn, security was paradoxically a product of testing ourselves in challenging experiential environments and learning the personal dispositions that would build a better world. 

Our challenge as we shape learning in the present time, is to think about what kinds of security we need and how best to prepare our students for the challenges ahead. 

Thank you Louise Avery, Gordonstoun Archivist, and Claire MacGillivray, Director of the Gordonstoun Summer School program, for welcoming Sharon and me into your school.

Glasnost

Most of my posts to-date have focused on blogging and teaching. This post takes a very different direction; it’s the potatoes to add a little variety to my overly meat-rich diet.

The United World College movement has just turned 50. The power and pervasiveness of Kurt Hahn’s original vision constantly surprises me as it finds expression in unexpected places. One recent voice to contribute to this conversation is Mikhail Gorbachev, a figure who, in my mind, stands in significance with the likes of fellow Nobel Prize winner Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi for the positive impact he has made on 20^th Century politics. It is thus humbling and surprising to find Gorbachev taking the time to address the UWC community directly.

In his letter to the UWC movement, Gorbachev writes:

Dear friends,

Please accept my congratulations on the

occasion of the 50th anniversary of United

World Colleges. During the years of its existence

your movement has been able to considerably

influence several generations of students from

many countries in a spirit of mutual respect,

peace and sustainable development. Today, this

mission is as important as ever.

In today’s world, old threats to peace are

persisting and new ones are emerging.

The current economic crisis, the crisis of

international relations and the threat of a new

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osipovva/5498928857

arms race testify to the fact that the twenty

years after the end of the Cold War have been

largely wasted instead of being used to build a

more secure and just world order.

The economy of many countries is in deep

crisis. One of the causes of this crisis is the

model that has defined global development for

the past few decades, a model based on seeking

superprofits and overconsumption, on social and

environmental irresponsibility, making the

human being merely a cog in an economic machine.

I am convinced that a transition to a new model

is inevitable. But this requires joint efforts of the

scientific and academic community. I therefore

applaud the vigorous efforts of your movement

to support the right to peace, social justice

and sustainable development and stand up

against injustice and inequality. It is particularly

important that your students and alumni take

this stand not merely in rhetoric but by working

actively in various humanitarian, educational

and environmental projects on all continents,

thus showing an example of engagement and

civic responsibility.

I find this letter sobering. The last twenty years, he tells us, ‘have been largely wasted’. We have not build a ‘more secure and just world’ but instead have focussed on ‘superprofits and overconsumption, on social and environmental irresponsibility, making the human being merely a cog in an economic machine.’

As I sit here in Singapore, an employee of UWCSEA, it is hard not to take this analysis to heart. This is a wealthy country where Mercedes and BMWs are big, black and ubiquitous. There seems sometimes to be something a little inadequate in a lunchtime bake-sale which raises a few hundred dollars for a worthy cause when each of us live a lifestyle built, literally, on the cheap labour of imported workers.

What Gorbachev reminds me is that my footprint on the earth is real and I must always look carefully to see where I am treading. The UWC mission walks a precarious line as we both rely on the ‘economic machine’ for the resources that allow us to exist and simultaneously explore and question its workings. The social responsibility one has in a position of privilege requires significant and difficult reflection.

Gorbachev himself provides a good lesson in the value of working carefully from within ‘the machine’. His reform agenda for the Soviet Union through “perestroika” resulted in the dissolution of the USSR and the birth of modern Europe. The central tenant of that movement was the notion of “glasnost”, or “openness”, and it is this idea that I think has particular resonance with the UWC movement. Kurt Hahn’s belief was that if you could put people from different cultures together and educate them as equals, they would emerge from their schools with a greater potential to create a just and peaceful world. I think he would have liked the idea of glasnost.