Education: The Moral Equivalent

In August 1932, five Nazi bully boys trampled a man to death in front of his mother. Up-&-coming Party Leader Adolf Hitler hailed the murderers as heroes. Next day Headmaster Kurt Hahn of Germany’s Salem (pronounced Zah-lem) School (near Lake Constance) notified every graduate that the time had come to choose: “Break with Hitler or with Salem.”

Many Germans thought it arrogant and pretentious of a schoolmaster to mention his little school and the big National Socialist movement in the same breath. Some knew that it was also dangerous. In March 1933, just 44 days after Hitler came to power, SA men surrounded the ancient Salem castle that housed the school, and arrested Headmaster Hahn.

This week, on his 62nd birthday, Kurt Hahn proudly recalled those days. But Schoolmaster Hahn is no man to live on his memories. After Hitler threw him out of Germany, he opened a school in Scotland and one in Wales. Just back in Britain from a fund-raising visit to the U.S., Hahn is now working on plans to start a string of new schools in Germany (one of his old boys has reopened Salem). His formidable goal: 100 schools, a million graduates, in ten years.

Tame Deer. It was tame deer that in spired Kurt Hahn to be a teacher. A psychologist might have classified the deer browsing listlessly in the park at Oxford’s Magdalen College, as well adjusted. But to Hahn, they seemed “contentedly unfit,’ lacking ambition even to jump the fence. Were most schools producing tame deer!

Turning to Plato’s Republic for guidance, young Hahn designed a stern academy to “molest” the contentedly unfit.* In 1920, in the castle of Prince Max of Baden, last Imperial chancellor, Hahn took the Prince’s son and three neighborhood children as his first pupils. By the time Hitler forced him into exile, he had 450.

Probe Yourself. At Gordonstoun last week, on the bleakly beautiful Morayshire coast of Scotland, 300 youngsters were busy manning coastguard lookouts, spotting forest fires, working at the village smithy, and striving mightily to win badges for moral and physical fitness. Headmaster Hahn is sure that his schools have found William James’s “moral equivalent of war.” Says Hahn: “One of the mysterious currents making for war … is the longing of the young to probe their reserves of … endurance, daring and resourcefulness.” One who probed himself: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, onetime Guardian (head boy) of Gordonstoun. At the Hahn-founded Outward Bound Sea School in Wales, 100 different boys come each month from schools, farms and factories throughout Britain, get to know something about “the sea, each other and themselves.” At reviving Salem, 340 demoralized young Germans are learning democracy, fitness and “active Christianity” —though chronic hunger slows the pace.

At Gordonstoun and at Salem, the day Degins with a cold shower and five minutes of Christian “prelude”; it ends with five minutes of silent thought. Says Hahn: No intellectual life [can develop] if :here is no opportunity and no desire to be alone.” After lunch, youngsters lie flat on the floor while a master reads. In the afternoon comes the active life. Says Hahn, quoting Swiss Theologian Karl Barth: “The world needs men, and it would be sad if it were just the Christians who did not wish to be men.”

-Hahn’s Seven Laws for education: i) give he children opportunities for selfdiscovery; ) make them meet with triumph and defeat; ) give them the opportunity of self-effacement n a common cause; 4) provide periods of si-snce; 5) train the imagination; 6) make games mportant but not predominant; 7) free the ons of the wealthy and powerful from the ener-ating sense of privilege.