Author ORCID Identifier
Jayson Seaman - https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6555-6171
Abstract
The invitation to comment on a foundational early article from the JAEOL provided a welcome opportunity to engage with Andrew Brookes’s trilogy of ‘neo-Hahnian outdoor education’ critiques (Brookes, 2003a, 2003b, 2023). In this article, I approach outdoor education’s character building ideology by using archival and secondary sources to situate its evolution in four periods corresponding with major geopolitical and cultural movements: (1) 1941–1945 when Outward Bound (OB) was established; (2) 1946–1952 when Hahn exported OB from his perch at Gordonstoun; (3) 1953–1967 when OB expanded to the U.S. and replicated globally, and (4) 1968–1976 when human potentialism replaced muscular Christianity as OB’s prevailing ideological frame. My account deepens and extends Brookes’s efforts by further illustrating how ‘character’ in OE is in no way timeless or universal but has always reflected the dominant ideological register of given periods as it was mobilized for different organizational, social, and political purposes.
Department
Recreation Management and Policy
Publication Date
4-15-2025
Journal Title
Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Seaman, J. (2025). Anchoring ‘neo-Hahnian outdoor education’ in the cold war era: A history of character building in the Outward Bound movement. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning. https://doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2025.2494035
Comments
This is a preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning in 2025, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2025.2494035