Humana People-to-People Alert - the TG

 Where is the TG based......?  

 What is the Teachers Group? 

The Teacher's Group is Amdi Petersen's brilliant idea and the stroke of evil genius that distinguishes Tvind and Humana People-to-People from every other volunteering organisation.

In essence it's a club - a collective of like-minded people, who have agreed between themselves to further the revolution (or save the world, or whatever) by pooling their energy and resources. This entails a huge financial, emotional and psychological commitment. TG members follow three precepts: Common Economy, Common Time and Common Distribution. It was founded in Denmark the 1970s and is now a worldwide phenomenon: at any one time there are a few hundred adherents. Some people have spent all their adult lives living the TG way.

A great idea! Unfortunately, like so many utopian schemes, it is ripe for abuse. TG members are often highly 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 exploitation. And the sens of being a free-willed participant can be illusiry - in fact, the TG is neither particularly egalitarian nor democratic, and is an inward-facing body run by a self=selected elite. 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. By 1999, he was head teacher at Winestead Hall, in the north of England, then a Tvind 'small school' for emotionally-maladjusted children. That year the school was closed down by British authorities following an enquiry, 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 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.

There are well-documented cases of children 'accidentally' conceived by Teachers Group devotees being handed over for 'adoption', and schooling by the movement in its own schools.This 'anti-family' ethos reached its height in one extreme case, when 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 'compensated' by the Teachers Group with 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

  The three TG vows  

Common Economy: Teachers transfer their available income to joint savings, while for their own requirements they receive food, lodging and pocket money from the community.

Common time: TG members are available to the community and to a certain extent forgo their personal rights (such as, for example, the right to start a family according to their own wish).

Common distribution: the community is to decide where TG members work and what they do. In practice this is decided by a committee called 'The Distribution Group'.

 The TG - recommended reading 

The definitive guide to the Teachers Group, it's history and financial structure:

'The Master of Tvind' by Frede Farmand