The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (52 page)

Language block is not confined to the poorly educated but is found in every class of society at every level of intelligence. The French film director Francois Truffaut considered himself an extreme case and despaired of learning English. His inability to communicate led him to take an interest in stories of children who had been brought up wild and were unable to speak any language, and resulted in the film
L’Enfant Sauvage
(The Wild Child). An added interest in educational experiments with autistic or delinquent children made it almost inevitable that he would eventually find his way to Michel.
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‘Block’, Michel believes, is a result of bad teaching in childhood. ‘We handicap and hobble and put a heavy lid on the immense innate learning potential of the human mind that is in everyone. Education has become a conspiracy between parents and governments to control children. Every child is institutionalised at the age of five or six and sentenced to at least ten years’ hard time until so-called graduation. Children serve time by law, and I call it a conspiracy because parents consent to it and the government enforces it. So children become prison inmates - except unlike prison inmates they do not have a voice with which to protest, or advocates to protect their rights. Children don’t have anybody. They have to serve their time unconditionally. After such an experience many naturally feel they have had enough of education and learning. They have no wish to continue. School’s over and done with -learning’s finished. From childhood on we are conditioned to associate learning with tension, effort, concentration, study. In essence, learning equals pain. The educational experience has been a painful one, and has capped the immense learning potential of each child. This is a tragedy.’

Conventional teaching, Michel argues, closes rather than opens the mind and cripples even the best students, blocking the subconscious because of the tension it creates. ‘Why not make use of the full potential of the human mind, by combining the conscious and subconscious? And you can only tap into that if someone is in a relaxed and pleasant frame of mind. It is important to eliminate anxiety and tension. Then and only then is a person completely receptive to learning. People do not want to expose themselves to more pain, or face what they think are their own inadequacies. Yet these are the very people who become most excited when they see that they can absorb and progress quickly and easily.’

Michel’s approach overcomes the most stubborn cases, and he insists there is no such thing as someone being unable to learn. He emphatically rejects the idea that a person has to have a gift, or ‘ear’, to be able to learn a language. ‘Have you ever met anyone, however stupid, who cannot speak their own language? Everyone is gifted.

Anyone who can speak his native tongue has already proved his gift for language and can learn another.’

In a letter to a friend about his experience with Michel, Truffaut wrote, ‘He has never criticised me. His manner is a little like that of a psychoanalyst and he has the patience of an angel... Anyway, he told me that he would make it his job to teach me and that I wouldn’t leave here without being able to write, read, speak and even understand.’
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Michel was as good as his word, and after sixty hours of lessons Truffaut was able to read his first book in English (Selznick’s
Memo
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), watch and understand the Nixon Watergate hearings on TV, and write the following inscription on a photograph for his teacher: ‘At first I learn from you the word “impeachment” and four weeks later I was able to have a meeting in English at Warner Bros headquarters. Thanks, Michel, warmest regards.’
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Truffaut presented him with a beautiful set of Proust - in French.

A further success with both teachers and children in a Los Angeles primary school was also ignored by the educational establishment. In the early 1970s Michel was approached by Andréa Kasza, principal of Norwood Elementary School in the heart of South Central Los Angeles. The principal had a serious and fundamental problem with her five hundred pupils. The school had originally been split between sixty per cent black and forty per cent Hispanic students, but was moving rapidly towards a Spanish-speaking majority. None of the new arrivals spoke English, and there was not a single Hispanic teacher on the staff. ‘There were only two who knew any Spanish at all - one of whom was Jewish, and the other Japanese.’ There were no government programmes at the time to help, and while Kasza attempted to hire Spanish-speaking teachers, she sought desperately for something to fill the gap. ‘I wanted the staff to learn enough Spanish quickly to be able to communicate with the students. I had heard about Michel’s Foundation and contacted him. We set up a class for twenty teachers who had no Spanish at all, and they took one of his crash courses.’ It was an unqualified success. ‘The teachers were very happy with the programme and many of them went on to become fluent in the language.’ During the course, Michel decided he also wanted to work with the young children, which he had not done before, to help them speak English. ‘I didn’t have the money to hire him for a year, and he did it pro bono,’ Rasza said. ‘It would never have happened otherwise.’ Michel was given carte blanche for a year to teach not just languages but every subject. ‘I had thirty kids in the class and divided them into two groups. One used a teacher and one used tapes, and I rotated them. It worked like a charm.’ A six-week block was set aside when the primary school children who spoke only sub-standard barrio Spanish were taught nothing but English as a foreign language. ‘A child in America must speak English or become a permanent second-class citizen. So they learned English and also had their level of Spanish raised. They learned how to speak and write in both languages in these six weeks.’ The second six-week block course was in mathematics, again using a rotating combination of teachers and tapes.

Rasza watched Michel at work and devised a curriculum over time to enable ordinary schools to adopt the method without disruption. The programme started with kindergarten and spread to involve all grades and the entire staff. The Spanish community approved because the programme maintained the use of both languages. The school became recognised as having the best transition programme in the country, and people came from all over the world to study it. ‘We developed an outstanding programme,’ Rasza said. ‘The teachers loved it, the children loved it, the parents loved it and we had great press.’

The courses were given the official endorsement of the California Teachers’ Association and the National Education Association. Michel was greatly excited and waited for the various state and federal educational bodies to express interest. ‘I waited for the phone to ring. I expected the Education Department to hammer on my door. Instead, there was silence. Nothing.’

‘I don’t know why people don’t support things,’ Rasza said. ‘It’s so difficult to create change. Certainly don’t look for it in the language departments of the universities. They’re the most resistant to change of any educational group I know. They ignore the practitioners. A new approach means asking a whole department to change its attitude, and that’s the problem. In the academic world people get comfortable with what they’re doing. What would happen to all those Spanish professors with tenure? They’d have to change their ways. If the man who invented the paperclip needed the approval of a university department we would never have had the paperclip. They would say people had never used paperclips before, so who needs them?’

One of the young teachers at Norwood Elementary School, Alice Burns, approached Michel one day with two tickets for a concert. I had been on the course and after just one day I was in awe,’ Alice said. ‘I had just never seen anybody synthesise the things that we learned as theoretically sound. I had been sent on a university course at USC and there was no comparison. The course I took there was the same sort of fragmented language instruction that we’re all familiar with.’

The couple began to go out regularly together. One evening, after dinner, Michel suggested that they drive to the airport and get on the first plane to wherever it happened to be going.

‘That would be great,’ Alice said calmly. ‘Let’s do it.’

Michel looked closely at his date. ‘I realised that it would be wonderful to travel with this woman. To me, to travel with somebody is even more of a test than living with them. And I decided this was somebody I could travel with - possibly settle down with. So we looked at each other, bypassed the airport and drove to a hotel in Newport Beach and spent the weekend together. It was the beginning of a very special relationship. It started me thinking in a different way. Over the years I always had a strong desire for a family and children, especially during the war when I thought I might be killed. I had the need for someone to survive me. But I had hidden the desire, and convinced everyone in Hollywood I was not the marrying kind, not a family man. Alice brought this out of me as my feelings for her deepened.’

They were married within a year.
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Alice was born and brought up a Catholic, but had converted to Judaism in her teens. Her father, a history professor in Oklahoma, was part Osage Indian. ‘I was a spiritually orientated person, but I was constantly in conflict with Catholicism. I seemed always to be breaking some rule and nobody gave me an explanation why. I never had that conflict with Judaism.’
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The couple wanted children quickly, and a son was born in the first year of their marriage. He was named Gurion, the Hebrew word for lion. When Michel saw the baby, tears of emotion welled in his eyes - the first he had shed since long before the war.
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After the birth of a second child - a daughter, Micheline - the couple decided to move to the east coast where they set up house in Larchmont, New York, half an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Michel opened a school. ‘I brought the children up with a reverence for life - for people, for animals and even plants. When the kids picked wild flowers and threw them down, I tried to make them feel responsible by putting the flowers in water and taking care of them.’ Micheline took the lesson to heart and grew attached to a cockroach. She travelled into Manhattan on the train with her unlikely pet in a jam jar and showed it to fellow travellers for them to admire.

Michel often worked late in his study on the ground floor of the house. One night, as he sat at his desk, six-year-old Guri came down the stairs from his bedroom. The child entered the study and immediately made for a half-open drawer where he spotted an SS dagger from Michel’s wartime collection. ‘I brought up both of my children not to have military toys - no guns, no shooting - and here he had stumbled on all this Nazi stuff. It was a contradiction. I felt caught.’

To the small boy, the dagger seemed like a sword, and he was thrilled by it. ‘Why do you have this sword?’ he asked. ‘How did you get it?’ Michel felt uncomfortable, and was wondering how to respond to the six-year-old when Guri answered his own question. ‘You took it from a bad guy.’ Michel nodded as the child came up with another question. ‘Who are the bad guys, Daddy?’ Again the child answered his own question with information picked up at Bible study. ‘It must be the Assyrians.’

Michel thought, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want this. The Assyrians will become the Syrians, and then it will be the Arabs. I don’t want him to go down this road.’ It was a critical moment. He could either burden his son with a legacy of hate - albeit the legitimate hatred of Nazi evil - or introduce him to a more complicated world of personal responsibility. ‘One is not born with hatred, one learns hatred. Children are injected with it and then they grow up with it. As adults they have to find reasons to justify their hatred, and they find these reasons. Hatred is dangerous because it can last for ever, be handed down from one generation to the next. There are antidotes to most poisons, but none for the poison of hatred. Especially if it is inculcated in children.’

He told Guri that he had taken the sword from a Nazi bad guy.

A few days later Guri had a new question. ‘If God created all life, did he create bad guys and Nazis?’

Michel told his son to fetch his latest favourite toy, a space figure with a revolving head that revealed different expressions ranging from benign to downright evil. Michel rotated the head, moving from one expression to another, and asked Guri to tell him whether the face was a bad guy or a good guy. The child became engrossed in the game, emphatically differentiating between the two.

‘We are all created by God but we are not puppets of God,’ Michel explained. ‘We are not being played or manipulated by God. Good or bad is within all of us and it is what we do with our lives, and with ourselves, that brings it out. Those who do not suppress the bad side of themselves, but allow it to dominate, will be bad guys. There are people in whom sometimes the bad will triumph and sometimes the good, and nobody can trust them because they can’t trust themselves. They are people with many faces. It is important to know what we have in us, to work towards one strong, good face.’

Later, he explained to his son that nations too had many faces, and what they made of their history shaped their nature. ‘I taught my children not to follow the crowd, and elevated a couple of lines from the Bible to the level of commandments: Thou shalt not follow the multitude to do evil, and Thou shalt not stand idly by. I’m not a religious man. But let me say that my life has led me to believe in God. A more precise explanation would be that I believe in the divine spirit of God, a universal God. I am happily Jewish because it is a religion without dogma - there is nothing that cannot be questioned. I accept the differences between human beings. I see a brotherhood of mankind regardless of colour, creed or race, and believe in what is God-given in all of us. But what Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler were capable of doing is something we all carry. We have the same seeds in us, the same potential for evil in certain conditions and in certain circumstances. It is up to us what we become.’