Remembering Kurt Hahn with a Prize that celebrates tenacity, courage and compassion
Posted: 04 June 2022
The 5th of June 2022 would have been the 136th birthday of Kurt Hahn, the man whose passion for experiential learning and character education inspired the foundation of Round Square some 56 years ago.
Each year, the Kurt Hahn Prize, a global award, is presented to a single student or group of students in recognition of an exceptional act of service to others, with the aim of acknowledging individual student enterprise, bravery, tenacity, and compassion, whilst encouraging a sustained spirit of unity and collaboration among all Round Square schools.
The first Kurt Hahn Prize was donated to Round Square by Altsalemer Vereinigung (Schule Schloss Salem Alumni), in appreciation of Hahn’s lifelong contribution to learning. Kurt Hahn considered “the foremost task of education” to be the survival and development in young people of “an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all, compassion.”
The 2022 Kurt Hahn Prize will be presented at the RS International conference in September to Year 11 students, Sena and Meera, from St Mildred’s Lightbourn School in Canada, who co-founded The Indigenous Foundation. In November of 2020, through academic research assignments, they became aware of issues affecting Indigenous people of Canada. What they learnt through these assignments ignited in them a desire to make a positive difference and bring about change. They decided to create an Instagram account as a way to spread awareness and reach others. Since their first post on 30th November 2020, they have amassed more than 63,000 followers, built a podcast and pulled together a team of more than 300 contributors, in Canada and across the globe, who input into social media posts, blogs and artwork.
Through their platforms they aim to uplift and amplify indigenous voices, indigenous advocates and indigenous stories, and to educate others about Indigenous rights, motivating them to take accountability, and practice advocacy and action. Together they have raised more than $10,000 toward the Indian Residential Schools Survivors Society and the Native Wellness Institute. Sena and Meera are currently in the process of formally registering The Indigenous Foundation as a non-profit, and are planning a speaker series, book club and artwork showcase for Indigenous resilience and self-expression.
Theirs is a story of true servant-leadership, of active compassion and allyship on issues they care passionately about. “At the simplest level, Servant Leadership begins when we overcome what Kurt Hahn described as ‘the widespread disease of spectatoritis’”, says Round Square Chief Executive, Rachael Westgarth. “Students are instead encouraged to stand up, be counted, speak up and take action when it matters most. The Kurt Hahn Prize recognises and celebrates students who exemplify this principle, who are ready to challenge the world and effect positive change, both now and in the future, to improve the lives and prospects of others. With their creation of The Indigenous Foundation, Sena and Mera are worthy winners of this year’s prize”.
Whilst, over the years, the Kurt Hahn Prize has been presented to individuals and groups of students for a wide variety of acts of service, bravery and compassion, there have been some recurring themes. Once such theme is disaster recovery, in the spirit of Kurt Hahn’s belief that “the Passion of rescue reveals the highest dynamic of the human soul”.
Our 2013 winner was Violetta Betsch from Schule Schloss Salem in Germany, who came up with the idea for a Multi-Purpose Aid Parcel, whilst watching a report about the earthquake of Samoa and thinking of the Tsunami in Thailand 5 years earlier. Whilst shocked by the destructive power of these natural catastrophes, and impressed by the level of aid that had poured in from around the world, Violetta couldn’t help but also be concerned by the volume of packaging waste that was being created. Inspired by the way in which developing communities around the world are inventive in creating shelter from different discarded materials, she wanted to find a means for the packaging to create a stable shelter. The result of was a box that combines packaging and transporting of relief supplies with a mobile, lightweight shelter.
In 2018 the Kurt Hahn Prize was presented to Heather Chisholm from Rothesay Netherwood in Canada, who, on hearing of a hurricane spreading mass destruction across the island of Dominica in the Caribbean, determined to build a school out of upcycled shipping containers, built to withstand 100 mph winds and 50-foot waves. These tough, durable, container classroom offered a safe and much needed learning space for children affected by the storm.
These examples celebrate ‘rescue’ as a large-scale intervention, rather than an immediate and dramatic life-saving exercise, though in past years, award recipients have risked their own lives in those immediate acts of bravery as well. But not all interventions that are worthy of recognition are especially big or overtly brave. Sometimes it is the smaller, and altogether quieter impact on the live of just one individual that makes that all important positive difference in the world.
Our 2014 Kurt Hahn prizewinner was inspired by a friendship she formed. Through a community sports programme, Poppy Walton from The Regent’s School Pattaya in Thailand made friends with eight-year-old Yok, a young Thai girl from the local Deaf school. Poppy set a personal goal to learn sign language, and at the same time became curious as to whether it was possible to improve Yok’s hearing. When she received the news that it was possible, but expensive, she determined to raise the funds needed. Poppy completed an eight-day sponsored bike ride, accompanied by her father, cycling a distance of more than 450 KM from Ayuthaya in Thailand to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. She created an online blog called the Temple to Temple Challenge and documented her progress, thoughts and feelings, and started to canvas for sponsorship. At the time of the prize presentation she had raised more than 300,000 Baht (c.£7K) and Yok was awaiting her operation.
As Poppy found, whilst through Round Square, students are brought face-to-face with some of the world’s biggest problems, they often learn that the solutions lie in the cumulative effect of many small interventions at a very local level. This was certainly the case for our 2015 Prizewinner, Akriti Suri, from Vivek High School in India, who set out to help the women of her local village with access to affordable sanitary products through investing her own life savings in buying sanitary napkin manufacturing machines. From this simple desire to help others Akriti established ‘Pankh’, a social enterprise that produces low-cost sanitary products for the village of Parnwoo. This small business has not only improved the lives of many disadvantaged women through improved hygiene, but also provided employment for a number of them, and, in the end, supported tens of thousands of girls in the local area.
Also in support of the global issue of Women’s Rights, In 2019 Shreya Mantha from Providence Day School in the USA received the Prize in recognition of her “Foundation For Girls” initiative, a youth-led social venture dedicated to empowering girls in crisis. Working with a local shelter that supports survivors of human trafficking, Shreya led her peers in offering a variety of help, including safe home-tutoring, to those living in the shelter.
The idea of offering tutoring to those in need previously featured in the 2016 Kurt Hahn Prize, presented to Rami Rustom, Sari Samakle and William Close from King’s Academy in Jordan, who decided to start an outreach programme to provide education for Syrian and Iraqi refugee children living in Jordan. They provided week long sessions and 3 month courses for both girls and boys, teaching them how to learn basic conversational English along with basic computer skills. King’s Academy was able to support with a mobile classroom, lending laptops and other equipment. At the time of the Prize presentation the students had raised $8000 USD to purchase equipment that was left behind for students to continue to use.
In both of these instances, our prizewinners were moved to intervene in support of those in need in their local community. But whether the challenge is tackled at a local level, or globally; whether it is to support a community in a distant land, or or being that person who makes a huge positive difference in the life of another person, the end result, is that students learn-by-doing and exercise their understanding of the most important lesson of all, as Kurt Hahn said “Above all… compassion”.