Schouten was born in Nieuwer-Amstel to a family of eminent shipping magnates. He attended a Hogere Burger School, and later he took up studies in electrical engineering at the Delft Polytechnical School. After graduating in 1908, he worked for Siemens in Berlin and for a public utility in Rotterdam before returning to study mathematics in Delft in 1912. During his study he had become fascinated by the power and subtleties of vector analysis. After a short while in industry, he returned to Delft to study Mathematics, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1914 under supervision of Jacob Cardinaal with a thesis entitled .