Kurt Hahn was born in Germany in 1896, the son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, but he lived much of his life in England as an Englishman. While he was still in high school in 1902 he spent a summer vacation in the Dolomites with friends from Abbotsholme, an English public School. During this trip, in discussions about the English Public school system, the first educational seeds were sown. This led to a later obsession about education that was strongly influenced by studies of Plato, Baden Powell, Cecil Reddie, Dr Arnold of Rugby, Herman Lietz and others.

In 1904, while still a young man, Hahn suffered severe sunstroke that left him with a permanent disability over which he triumphed with the greatest courage. It was partly the long recovery periods associated with the sunstroke that provided him with the opportunity to study educational philosophies in greater depth and formulate the system of education that he promoted throughout his life. He exemplified one of his favorite aphorisms, "your disability is your opportunity", by turning ill fortune to good purpose.

Hahn's educational philosophy was a collage of what he considered the best ideas drawn from as many sources as possible. He was quite proud that there was nothing new about his schools and their operation. He would illustrate this with a story of the distinguished American who, while being shown around Salem School, asked Hahn's colleague, Prince Max von Baden, what he was most proud of in the school. The Prince's reply was to the effect that nothing was original and that they had borrowed from all sorts of other educators and institutions. The American expressed the view that surely all schools should aim at being original. Prince Max quickly replied:

In education, as in medicine, you must harvest the wisdom of a thousand years. If you ever come across a surgeon and he wants to extract your appendix in the most original manner possible, I would strongly advise you to go to another surgeon.

So it was with Hahn; he would rather use material that was already proven to work rather than experiment with something new. However, his success lay in the selection and unique combination of the principles that he decided to "borrow".

It was his belief that every child is born with innate spiritual powers and ability to make correct judgments about moral issues. In the progression through adolescence, the child loses these spiritual powers and the ability to make moral judgments because of, what Hahn calls, the diseased society and the impulses of adolescence. Hahn was obsessed by the social declines or social diseases that he observed in society. These have been variously described as:

1. The decline in fitness due to the modern methods of locomotion.
2. The decline of initiative and enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis.
3. The decline of memory and imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life.
4. The decline of skill and care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship.
5. The decline of self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquilizers.
6. The decline of compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted.

As part of his concern for physical well-being he believed that every child has both a natural physical aptitude and a natural physical inaptitude. Both provide opportunities: one to develop strength and the other to overcome weakness. This was the source of another of Hahn's aphorisms, "There is more in you than you think." Hahn's goal was to provide an "ideal pasture" for these innate powers and abilities to manifest themselves. One of the pastures he created was Outward Bound.