I have been sorting through my bookshelves recently and digitising some of Kurt Hahn’s writing to share on this website. Reading it again, I have found myself thinking about Trump and Putin, the language of politicians here at home, and how readily people can be persuaded to fear those they have never met. An article Hahn wrote in 1936 has felt particularly relevant.
I worry about what Trump and Putin are doing to our world. They are different men, and their actions need to be judged separately, but I see jingoism in both: the cultivation of national pride through grievance, threats and the identification of enemies. Putin’s war against Ukraine shows the terrible consequences of a powerful country refusing to respect its neighbour’s independence. Trump’s attacks on international cooperation, and his portrayal of migration as an assault on Western countries, encourage distrust when we urgently need governments capable of working together.
Listening to them, I wonder what young people are learning about leadership. They hear powerful men speak as though acknowledging another country’s needs is a weakness and accepting limits on their own freedom of action is a humiliation. They also see how much attention this behaviour attracts, while the patient work of finding agreement rarely receives anything like the same coverage.
These questions matter to me because I have spent much of my life working with young people. Through teaching, Scouting and The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award, I have tried to help them develop the confidence to make their own decisions and the willingness to contribute to other people’s lives. Hahn helped shape the educational thinking behind that work. His influence on the Award makes the connection particularly close, but his ideas about service, responsibility and learning through experience reach much further.
That is why his writing has stayed on my shelves. He understood that young people need opportunities to find out what they can do, including the discovery that other people can depend on them. Adults sometimes become so busy preparing young people for a future contribution that we overlook what they could contribute now. Hahn expected them to take responsibility and believed that, with preparation and encouragement, they could rise to it.
In this article, published in The Inverness Courier in March 1936, he describes Gordonstoun boys undertaking coastal rescue duties. They learnt the necessary skills and kept watch because lives might be at risk. His account reflects the satisfaction of doing something useful, with consequences beyond a mark, a certificate or an adult’s approval. I recognise that understanding of service from the work I have been fortunate enough to do.
But I do not want to put Hahn on the website as though everything he wrote deserves our agreement. Reading the original texts is a useful corrective to the reassuring quotations that tend to circulate around a celebrated founder. Some of his assumptions make me uncomfortable, and some deserve a straightforward challenge.
The world he describes is almost entirely a world of boys. His reference to what “every normal boy” should be able to achieve raises an obvious question about those who did not fit his expectations. As someone with dyspraxia, I read his emphasis on physical proficiency with mixed feelings. Challenge can help a young person discover capabilities they did not know they had, but it can also reinforce a sense of inadequacy if the activity, teaching or expectations take too little account of the individual.
I am no more persuaded that cold showers provide a reliable route to good character. Nor do I warm to his “Anti-lout Society” and his account of adolescents losing the freshness and charm of childhood. Young people are allowed to become awkward, to disagree with us and to develop interests we do not share. If we want them to think for themselves, we must accept that they may use that freedom to question our judgement.
His politics need careful reading too. Hahn gives considerable attention to German grievances about the Treaty of Versailles. Whatever the injustices of that settlement, an account published in 1936 that dwells on Germany’s insecurity leaves me wanting to hear much more about the fears of its neighbours. Understanding a country’s grievances does not oblige us to accept its account of what it is entitled to do about them.
That seems particularly relevant when thinking about Russia and Ukraine. We need to understand Putin’s calculations if we are to deal with him, but Ukrainians’ rights cannot become a secondary consideration in a discussion about what would make Russia feel secure. Their homes and futures belong to them. A powerful neighbour’s dissatisfaction cannot be allowed to settle the matter.
Hahn himself gives us a good example of how national loyalties can distort our thinking. He describes teaching his pupils about an objection to part of the Versailles settlement that would have tied people’s future to the ownership of coal mines. He then argued against the loss of predominantly Polish territory because Germany depended on its potato production. A fifteen-year-old boy pointed out that Hahn was now treating Polish people as possessions attached to potato fields.
I like the fact that he tells us this. He could have left it out and presented himself as the wise educator helping his pupils overcome their prejudices. Instead, he records a pupil catching him doing precisely what he had criticised in others. Anyone who has taught, led an organisation or chaired a meeting ought to recognise the possibility of being that adult.
It also makes his argument about patriotism more convincing. He knew from his own behaviour how easily love of country could become an excuse for giving less weight to someone else’s rights. His belief that patriotism could grow “stronger and nobler by including the love of humanity” was accompanied by an admission that he had failed to live up to it.
I have been thinking about that failure as I read reports of recent unrest. Earlier this month, anti-migrant protests in Durban and Soweto turned violent, with vehicles burned and foreign-owned shops looted. South Africa’s government blamed disinformation about an asylum ruling for triggering the violence. In Belfast in June, families were burned out of their homes during anti-immigrant violence following a knife attack; the injured man’s family appealed for calm.
The circumstances differ, but people were attacked because of the group to which others believed they belonged. We saw that here after the Southport murders in 2024, when false claims that the attacker was an asylum seeker spread rapidly and a mosque became a target. The murdered children and their families deserved care and justice. Making unrelated people afraid in their own neighbourhoods added suffering to suffering.
I find it hard to read those accounts without asking what has happened before a crowd gathers. What have people been told about their neighbours? Whose claims have they come to trust, and why are they so ready to believe that an individual crime tells them something about an entire community? The person who commits an offence is responsible for it, but public figures also have responsibilities for the suspicions they encourage.
That is why Nigel Farage’s renewed defence this month of his description of Channel crossings as an “invasion” troubles me. People are entitled to argue about immigration, to question asylum policy and to expect competent government. But an invasion involves an enemy, and describing people arriving by boat in those terms encourages us to see a hostile force before we have considered any individual’s circumstances.
Trump used similar language at the United Nations last year when he accused the organisation of funding an assault on Western countries and their borders. I do not think we should become so accustomed to such language that we cease to notice what it asks us to believe. It presents cooperation as complicity and people seeking entry as a collective threat. Those are serious claims, carrying consequences for how people are treated.
Hahn was concerned about the distrust beneath our institutions. He described an expertly engineered dam that failed because it had been built on crumbling stone, and asked what political arrangements could achieve if their foundations were equally unsound. The comparison still seems useful. Treaties and institutions depend on countries keeping commitments when doing so becomes inconvenient, just as communities depend on people accepting that their neighbours have rights even when they disagree with them.
Goodwill will not, by itself, make those arrangements work. People struggling to find a home, get medical treatment or see a future for their children need practical answers. Hahn’s concern about class division belongs in this discussion as much as his internationalism does. We cannot expect trust to flourish where people feel persistently unheard or unfairly treated, and we leave the field open to those offering someone convenient to blame if we fail to address those experiences.
My own experience makes me return to the opportunities we give young people to know one another. In Scouting and the Award, working towards something together can create relationships that would otherwise never have formed. A person previously understood through a label becomes someone whose judgement you respect, whose company you enjoy or whose help you need. Prejudice does not disappear automatically, but it has more to contend with when experience contradicts it.
Those opportunities must also be within reach. We have not fulfilled Hahn’s ambition to bring people together across class if participation depends on what parents can pay, and we need to examine whose abilities our programmes recognise and whose they overlook. Taking his ideas seriously includes being willing to change the practices associated with them.
I began digitising these pieces because I wanted to make them available to others. Reading them again has also made me examine some of the assumptions behind my own work, including how well we have carried forward the parts of Hahn’s thinking that matter most. In the present climate, I am particularly drawn to his account of the pupil who challenged him. I would like the young people listening to today’s leaders to have that boy’s confidence, and the adults around them to be willing to hear what they have to say.
Reflecting on Kurt Hahn’s Education and Peace, reprinted from The Inverness Courier, 24 March 1936. You can browse the digitised Hahn material in my resources section.
