The timeless rules of youth

Every so often, one stumbles across some long-forgotten text that could have been written yesterday. It’s a reminder that often the answers to today’s problems lie in the past. I had one of those moments when I read Lord Baden-Powell’s Rovering to Success. Recently I had another such moment reading about Kurt Hahn’s Six Declines of Modern Youth. He wrote of a widespread decline of self-discipline, a dislocation from the world and a weakened tradition of craftsmanship. All this, and more, rings true. And, God knows, we need to find solutions.

Kurt Hahn is not exactly unknown: the German-born educator who later settled in Scotland was the late Duke of Edinburgh’s headmaster at Gordonstoun which Hahn founded together with Lawrence Holt. Hahn was always determined that his principles of education should be disseminated far and wide: ‘supposing we had developed a remedy of a particularly grave disease’ he explained, ‘We ought to feel uneasy in our conscience if we only administered it in our own institution; we ought to do all we can to make it available to the great mass of patients suffering’.