What is the Teachers Group? 

The Teacher's Group is Amdi Petersen's brilliant idea and the masterstroke that distinguishes Tvind from every other volunteering organisation.

In essence it's a club - a collective of like-minded people, who agree between themselves to further the revolution (or whatever) by pooling their resources. TG members follow three precepts: Common Economy, Common Time and Common Distribution. It was founded in the 1970s and at any one time a few hundred adherents. Some people have spent all their adult lives living out the TG way.

A great idea! Unfortunately, like so many utopian schemes, it is open to abuse. TG members are often highly motivated, loyal and idealistic, but by surrendering control of their lives to the community - or to powerful senior leaders - they place themselves at risk of psychological and financial abuse. The TG is often described as a cult.

 Steen Thomsen's story 

Steen Thomsen is today a school teacher in northern Denmark. Back in the early 1970s, he became a Tvind supporter, and was invited to join Amdi Petersen's Teachers Group.

Thomsen spent the next 26 years in the TG. In 1999, however, Winestead Hall, where he was head teacher, was closed by British authorities and Thomsen himself was briefly detained by British police. As a result he resigned from the Teachers Group and wrote a highly critical and detailed report for the Danish government,

Among other things he claimed in it that the Teachers Group is a heirarchical cult, that ordinary members were bullied and abused by a coterie of high-ranking 'leaders', and that Teachers were being financially exploited. His report laid bare for the first time detailed allegations of psychological and financial abuse.

You can read the full report in English here.

 'A kind of monastic secet society'  

When we started this inquiry, we asked for information on the Teachers Group. 'A kind of monastic secret society or cult' was one reply. That certainly seems to have been the case - and possibly still is today. Horror stories about life in the Teachers Group are legion.

The Teachers Group has long had a reputation as conspiratorial, inward-looking and divorced from ordinary life. The house rules confirm the impression of a cult. TG members have always set themselves apart. In the 1970s, in a decree from Amdi Petersen's office, Teachers were told to cut themselves off from parents, relatives and friends, burn family photographs, throw away old school reports, avoid newspapers or TV, and not associate with outsiders - and they complied.

TG members tend to work, eat and play together - the rest of the world is somewhere else. They cannot drink alcohol. At its politically correct worst, Teachers have been encouraged to inform on each other, with rebels ostracised or publicly humiliated - as in the Maoist Cultural Revolution. We have heard well-documented stories from the 1970s-80s of grown men and women being made to 'stand in the corner' or run around the yard as punishments for not being up to the mark - it is no surprise then if today Teachers feel under unrealistic pressure to deliver.

Romantic relationships or sexual liaisons (even between TG members) have usually been discouraged, and at one time Teachers who broke this rule would find themselves transferred to other jobs miles away. Maybe this still happens.

This 'anti-family' ethos reached its apotheosis in the well-documented cases of several children conceived by Teachers Group devotees, but handed over for 'adoption' and schooling by the movement in its own schools. In at least one extreme case, a senior female Teacher is said to have been allowed a child, but only after her partner had been selected by 'lottery' from among other TG members. (And - this may be hard to believe - there are also many accounts of older, childless women Teachers being awarded pet dogs and cats as a substitute for the babies they never had.)

 Our stories - TG members  

Many other former TG members have come forward over the years. Here are some of their stories.

Britta Rasmussen was a Teacher at Tvind's Acha Pecha school in Virginia until 1984, when she became so concerned about the TG that she retreived her passport from the school office and fled through a window in the middle of the night.

'Lars', now living in Chicago, was a Teachers Group member helping run Tvind schools and companies in the US, from 1994-8. ' I denied I had been in a cult or had in any form been "brainwashed".  I know better now.'

Britta Junge, A Teachers Group volunteer in Africa for 15 years, says she was ordered by the TG to smuggle cash from Angola to bank accounts in Europe. Her evidence on a TV documentary helped persuade Danish police to start a fraud investigation

More stories.