The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (56 page)

Michel challenged the language heads’ methods, calling them obsolete and ineffective. And he made it clear that he was not prepared to allow his method to be diluted, but wanted it adopted in its entirety. The French department wanted Michel to submit the course for them to study before they gave permission for a demonstration class. ‘You can observe the demonstration,’ Michel told them, ‘and you’re welcome to participate and evaluate the results. What more can you want?’ The various heads of the language departments seemed to Michel to feel threatened and went on the defensive. From then on, academic politics appeared to take over. The head of the French department wrote a dense, jargon-laden memo rejecting the method - of which the department had no experience - on the grounds that it would cause ‘a potentially serious disturbance’.

However, the continued support of dean, chancellor and vice chancellor - all of whom were Michel’s enthusiastic ex-students - resulted in a small experimental programme being organised under the auspices of the UCLA’s Summer Sessions. Fliers went out to the students asking them to test the possibility of learning a year’s French in ten days. ‘Guaranteed success! The University cannot guarantee that any student will learn what is taught in any class, of course - we provide the instruction, but the student must do the learning. Michel Thomas is so confident of his program, however, that he is willing to make a guarantee: if you fail to pass the proficiency exam after this course, he will provide additional tutoring at no cost until you pass the exam.’
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UCLA even pointed out that the cost of the course was considerably less than its own twelve-unit summer intensive course. The appeal hoped to find twenty students willing to volunteer for the experiment. Two hundred and fifty signed up.

Ten days before the first students were supposed to begin, it was abruptly cancelled. ‘The reason for this action is that the support of the UCLA’s French Department was withdrawn, and University policy requires that all summer classes be approved by the academic department responsible for the area covered,’ the director of the Summer Sessions wrote in dismay. ‘There was considerable interest in this program among our students.’
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Clearly, if a ten-day course was on offer that was both cheaper than the university’s own intensive course and also succeeded in meeting a standard usually acquired after a year, the department would look ridiculous. ‘So the experiment never went through. And yet only I could have lost! If I failed I would have been wiped out, my reputation would have been in tatters. And they could have gone on teaching in the same old way getting the same level of results. And if the experiment succeeded all they had to do was think about it.’

Today, the educational establishment remains as impregnable as ever, but individuals, corporations, diplomats and film stars still beat a path to Michel’s door.
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(The French, to their credit, have recognised Michel’s talents, and the Societe d’Encouragement Au Progres, which comes under the guidance of the Academie Francaise, have awarded him their gold medal.)
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The waiting list for personal tuition grows ever longer. Among the stars Michel has taught are Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Tony Curtis, Bob Dylan, Princess Grace of Monaco, Melanie Griffith, Yves Montand, Diana Boss, Peter Sellers, Barbra Streisand, Baquel Welch, Natalie Wood... the list goes on and on and includes ambassadors, politicians, cardinals and industrialists. Woody Allen described learning with Michel as ‘effortless... a psychological breakthrough, some sort of miracle’. The most recent star to be taught by Michel is Emma Thompson, who learned Spanish. You follow these threads he creates with you as he slowly weaves it into your brain. He knits the structure of the language into your head. It’s magical.’
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And yet, despite all the plaudits heaped upon both man and method by those who have spent a small fortune to take the course, there are still those who remain convinced he must be a fraud. Perhaps it is all the talk of magic and miracles that puts people on their guard. When producer Nigel Levy approached the Science Department at the BBC to make the first film of the method, he experienced the disbelief and suspicion that has dogged Michel all his life. ‘They rejected it out of hand. On the grounds that they did not believe it was possible. They were quite dismissive.’ Eventually, a commissioning editor in the Education Department of the BBC agreed the method sounded fascinating, and it was arranged that Nigel Levy should take a language course and then be tested by independent adjudicators. ‘I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, so I chose that. I learned more in four days than I would have in years at any school or institute. Because the way he teaches is just so fundamental.’ Michel’s parting words were, ‘It’s important not to open any grammar textbooks - it will only confuse you. It’s very important to leave it alone. Do not try to remember.’ Nigel Levy found the advice impossible to take. ‘It was all I could think about. I desperately wanted the technique to work for the sake of the film I wanted to make. I tried to revise my grammar and got thoroughly confused.’

A week later he prepared to take the various tests the BBC had organised. He was examined by the Cervantes Institute, which was given no indication of his level of knowledge of Spanish. He felt that by attempting to revise the grammar he had muddied the pool and feared he had made a thorough mess of the exam, but his Spanish was judged to be commensurate with a student who had spent a year at college and done homework. A second test was held later at the BBC with the commissioning editor and a teacher from a college of higher education. ‘This time I was relaxed. And I sat and chatted to the teacher for half an hour or so and could express myself easily. He couldn’t believe it when I told him how long I had been learning Spanish. He assumed I was intermediate level, which meant two years. It had been four days!’ The BBC went ahead and commissioned the programme.

Michel was challenged in the documentary, the first time he had allowed even a part of his method to be filmed, to demonstrate his technique by teaching half a dozen students French in a single week of term. At first sight the volunteer guinea pigs from Islington Sixth Form Centre in north London - described as ‘academically very average’ - did not instil confidence. All had failed whatever language GCSEs they had previously taken and were studying for vocational qualifications because they did not like exams. One had been written off as a hopeless case with regard to learning any language, told to give up trying and advised to take up woodwork. It almost seemed that the language master had been set up. Unfazed, Michel guaranteed without reservation to have them all speaking French in five days.

The standard, institutional classroom was changed into a cosy den. Desks and blackboards were replaced with armchairs, carpets and potted plants. Bright lights were dimmed and curtains drawn. After three days of lessons the pupils appeared as transformed as their surroundings. Animated and full of excitement, they interrupted one another to enthuse over the joys of long hours in the classroom. They spoke of Michel as a magician, insisting he could anticipate questions, banish inhibitions, create confidence - even read minds. Their imaginations had been captured and, perhaps for the first time, they found themselves in the grip of intellectual excitement. They had discovered they were not language duds after all. The surprise and thrill of this unexpected revelation made once dead eyes shine. And, sure enough, after five days they were able to speak French to one another in long, complicated sentences.

The head of French at the school, Margaret Thompson, was shown at the beginning of the documentary to be thoroughly sceptical. ‘I think there are different aptitudes for language. I think it requires things like attention to detail and hard graft that kids find boring and don’t want to be bothered with.’ At the end of the week, after witnessing the progress of the class, she was converted. ‘Impressive,’ she conceded graciously. ‘Very impressive. As the students say, they have done in a week what normally takes five years. I think the real lesson is that the sheer interest in learning is enough for the students. Knowledge keeps them interested. He’s really on to something here, something very important.’
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Michel has spent the whole of his life since the war teaching languages, and more than ten thousand students have passed through his schools. But he regrets that his influence has been minimal, a pebble cast in an ocean. ‘I feel that I have not made a dent in improving the educational system. All we are doing at best is rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking
Titanic
. It leaves me greatly frustrated that I have never managed to get the model school going as an educational showcase, and failed to set up the international university - although I’m not giving up. I have done and tried everything - and I mean everything - but have been defeated by an educational establishment that believes it is enlightened but is really autocratic and dictatorial.

‘My idea in essence has been to create excitement. To succeed with youngsters where others failed. With those who are wild, even with delinquents locked up for major crimes. I attempted to expose them to the experience of learning, which becomes the excitement of learning, which becomes the excitement of living. All you have to do is turn the key to unlock what is already there in every individual.

‘The desire to learn never really dies. It cannot be killed, it just becomes dormant. At all ages and in all conditions of life it can be awakened and can flourish. Every human being - I should say every living being - has a natural, inherent drive to learn. And this desire doesn’t have to be created or force-fed. It craves satisfaction.’

Michel Thomas never really wanted to teach languages, or anything else - it just turned out that way. Teaching became a way of carrying on the various battles he has waged throughout his life. ‘I fought, and continue to fight, an entrenched educational system to try to make it more open. I wanted to show what could be achieved with learning by removing the heavy lid and opening the mind. I wanted to demonstrate that anybody can learn. I didn’t devise my system to teach languages quickly. I did it to change the world.’

X - Never-ending war

For Michel Thomas, the war can never be over. The memories from those years remain as real and emotionally powerful as events in the present. Whenever he travels, he carries with him a suitcase stuffed with photos, letters and documents from the past. He has never been anywhere for more than a few days without this small parcel of history. Once, when he thought he had lost everything, he experienced an afternoon of uncharacteristic panic and despair.

The suitcase contains the haphazard archive of a long and eventful life and provides both anchor and backdrop in the various rented apartments, houses and hotel rooms he temporarily inhabits around the world. After a few days in any location its contents slowly spread, covering tables and shelves, until Michel is surrounded by his past. He sifts endlessly through the familiar disorder of his papers, often pausing over a faded document or creased photograph as if in a trance. Each item is a reminder of some significant event or person which the emotional memory developed as a child brings to life.

An old love letter from Suzanne, sent from Lyon, reminiscing about their days together in Paris, jostles with faded newspaper cuttings and pictures of his children. Horrific private pictures of corpses at Dachau lie on a glossy magazine containing an article on the language course. Pictures of past girlfriends are mixed in with ID cards from the Résistance, old CIC reports and correspondence. Photographs of Michel’s mother and aunt are scattered over the handwritten, pencilled confession of hangman Emil Mahl. The assortment is a jarring combination of great love and absolute evil.

The war goes on, and the enemy remains the same. The adversary was never really the Vichy government, or SS Storm Troopers, or even the Nazi war criminals that Michel tracked down after the war. The true enemy, and the one that still generates immediate, boiling anger, is the nameless, faceless bureaucrat who condemned Michel’s family to death for lack of a quota number. Forever with us, in peace as in war, he lives on as the symbolic leader of those who do not care.

Michel continues to battle the cohorts of this great grey mass. It includes the officials who have side-stepped his numerous attempts to bring the dark secrets of the Vichy years into the open, and ambitious political opportunists on extreme left and right who have manipulated the experiences of the victims of the Nazis to their own post-war political ends. It also numbers unimaginative educators who resist new methods of learning, and are prepared to sacrifice a child’s future to protect their own interests.

As a boy, Michel instinctively admired and emulated courage. Later, when life became hard and almost unbearable, he came to value it as the first of all virtues, without which no other can exist. In the war he conspired to surround himself with men of courage, from his French comrades in the Résistance to the American GIs of the Thunderbirds. Now, in the soft times of peace and prosperity, when quiet and undramatic acts of real courage are often overlooked, he clings to it more than ever as the moral quality that stands between humanity and ruin.

In Les Milles, when Michel thought he was about to be discovered by guards and transported to his death, he cried out to his universal God to be spared, and he made a covenant. He has never told another living soul the terms of the agreement, but his life suggests it must include promises to keep alive the memory of those slaughtered, and to struggle to prevent it happening again.