The Element

CHAPTER EIGHT Somebody Help Me

AFTER I CAUGHT POLIO, I went to a special school for the physically handicapped. This was standard procedure back then in Britain; the education authorities removed any children with disabilities from mainstream state schools and sent them to one of these special schools. So I found myself from the age of five traveling by special bus every day from our working‐class area of Liverpool across the city to a small school in a relatively affluent area. The Margaret Beavan School had about a hundred or so pupils aged from five to fifteen with various sorts of disability, including polio, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, asthma, and, in the case of one of my best friends there, hydrocephalus.

We weren’t especially conscious of each other’s disabilities, though many of us wore braces, used crutches, or were in wheel‐chairs. In that setting, the nature of anyone’s disability was more or less irrelevant. Like most kids, we formed our friendships based on people’s personalities. One of my classmates had cerebral palsy and severe spasticity. He couldn’t use his hands and spoke with tremendous difficulty. The only way he could write was by gripping a pencil between his toes and arching his leg over the desk. For all of that, he was a funny and entertaining guy once you got used to his strained efforts at speaking and could understand what he was actually saying. I enjoyed my time at the school and had all the childhood excitements and frustrations that I knew my brothers and sister were having at their “normal” schools. If anything, I seemed to like my school more than they liked theirs.

One day when I was ten, a visitor appeared in the classroom. He was a well‐dressed man with a kind face and an educated voice. He spent some time talking to the teacher, who seemed to me to take him very seriously. Then he wandered around the desks talking to the kids. I suppose there were about a dozen of us in the room. I remember speaking with him for a little while, and that he left soon afterward.

A day or so later, I received a message to go to the headmaster’s office. I knocked on the large paneled door, and a voice called me in. Sitting next to the head teacher was the man who’d come into my classroom. He was introduced to me as Mr. Strafford. I learned later that he was Charles Strafford, a member of a distinguished group of public officials in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. The government had appointed these senior educators to report independently on the quality of schools around the country. Mr. Strafford had particular responsibility for special schools in the northwest of England, including Liverpool.

We had a short conversation during which Mr. Strafford asked me some general questions about how I was getting on at the school and about my interests and family. A few days later, I received another message to go to the headmaster’s study. This time I wound up in another room and met a different man who asked me a series of questions in what I later understood was a general IQ test. I remember this vividly because I made a mistake during the test that really irritated me. The man read a series of statements and asked me to comment on them. One of them was this: “Scientists in America have discovered a skull which they believe belonged to Christopher Columbus when he was fourteen.” He asked me what I thought of that, and I said that it could not have been Christopher Columbus’s skull because he didn’t go to America when he was fourteen.

The moment I left the room, I realized what a stupid answer that was and turned to knock on the door to tell the man that I knew the real flaw in the statement. I heard him speaking to someone else, though, and decided not to interrupt. The next day I saw him crossing the playground and was about to accost him with the answer. But I worried that he would assume that I’d spoken with my dad overnight and that he’d told me the real answer. I decided it was a waste of time to correct things. Fifty years later, I’m still annoyed about this. I know; I should get over it.

My error turned out to be insignificant to whatever the testers were looking for in me. Shortly afterward, the school moved me to a different class of children who were several years older than me. Apparently, Mr. Strafford had spoken with the head teacher about me and said that he saw a particular spark of intelligence that the school wasn’t developing as fully as they could. He thought the school could challenge me more and that I had the potential to pass a test known at the time as the eleven‐plus examination.

In Britain back then, high school education took place in two different types of school: secondary modern schools and grammar schools. The grammar schools offered a more prestigious, academic education, and they were the primary routes to professional careers and universities. Secondary modern schools offered a more practical education for kids to take up manual and blue‐collar jobs. The whole system was a deliberate piece of social engineering designed to provide the workforce needed for the industrial economy in the UK. The eleven‐plus was a series of IQ tests developed to identify the academic aptitudes needed for a grammar school education. Passing the eleven‐plus was, for working‐class kids, the best path to a professional career and an escape from a possible lifetime of manual work.

The teacher in my new class was the redoubtable Miss York. She was a small woman in her forties, kind but with a reputation for being intellectually rigorous and demanding. Some of the teachers at the school had relatively low expectations of what we kids were likely to achieve in our lives. I think they saw the purpose of “special education” mainly as pastoral. Miss York did not. She expected of her “special” pupils what she would expect of any others: that they work hard, learn, and do their absolute best. Miss York coached me relentlessly in math, English, history, and a variety of other subjects. Periodically she would give me past eleven‐plus exams to practice on, encouraging me to excel at these. She remains one of the most impressive teachers I have ever met.

Eventually, with a group of other children from my school and other special schools in the area, I sat down to take the actual eleven‐plus exam. For weeks afterward, Miss York, Mr. Strafford, my parents, and I waited anxiously for the brown envelope from the Liverpool Education Committee to arrive with the potentially life‐changing result of the test. One morning in the early summer of 1961, we heard the letterbox clatter, and my mother ran to the front door. Tense with excitement, she carried the letter into the small kitchen where we were having breakfast and handed it to me to open. With a deep breath, I took out the small folded piece of paper inside the envelope with its typed message. I had passed.

We could hardly believe it. The house erupted in wild excitement. I was the first member of my family to pass this test, and the only pupil at the school who passed it that year. From that moment on, my life moved in a completely new direction. I received a scholarship to the Liverpool Collegiate School, one of the best in the city. In one leap, I moved from the special school into the upper ends of mainstream state education. There, I began to develop the interests and capacities that have shaped the rest of my life.

Charles Strafford became a close friend of my family and a frequent visitor to our packed, usually frenetic family home in Liverpool. He was a sophisticated, urbane man with a passion for helping people find the chances they deserved. A professional educator with a love of literature and classical music, he played the timpani, sang in choirs, and conducted music ensembles in Mersey‐side. He had a refined taste for good wines and brandies and lived in a finely furnished town house in northern England. He’d served as a major during World War II and had been part of the Normandy campaign. He kept a second home in Ranville in the Calvados region of northern France, where he had become a key figure in the local French community. Ranville now boasts a road named after him, the allée Charles Strafford. I visited him there in my university days, and he introduced me to local society and to the pleasures of French cuisine and calvados apple brandy, for which I am equally grateful.

For me, Charles Strafford was a window into another world. Through hands‐on, practical assistance, he facilitated my early journey from the back row of special education to what has become a lifelong passion for full‐scale educational reform. He was an inspirational role model for seeing the potential in other people and for creating opportunities for them to show what they can really do. Aside from my parents, he was my first true mentor and taught me the invaluable role mentors play in helping us reach our Element.

The Life‐Changing Connection

Finding our Element often requires the aid and guidance of others. Sometimes this comes from someone who sees something in us that we don’t see in ourselves, as was the case with Gillian Lynne. Sometimes it comes in the form of a person bringing out the best in us, as Peggy Fury did with Meg Ryan. For me, Charles Strafford saw that I would only reach my potential if my educators offered me greater challenges. He took the necessary steps to assure that it happened.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the person who was to mentor me for most of my adult life this far was also at school in Liverpool at the time, just a few miles away from me. I met Terry years later, when I was living and working in London in my late twenties. I was back in Liverpool for a week to run a course for teachers. She was teaching drama in a difficult, low‐income area of the city. We had an instant connection—which had absolutely nothing to do with teaching, education, or the Element—and we’ve been together ever since. She’s one of the finest mentors I know, not just to me but to friends, family, and everyone who works with her and for her. She knows intuitively the power and importance of mentors because they have been so important in her own life. While I was being mentored by Charles, she had a childhood mentor of her own. This is how she tells it:

“I went to an all‐girls Catholic high school run by an order of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy—a misnomer if ever there was one. This was the ‘swinging sixties,’ and we weren’t doing any swinging, but we were doing a lot of praying and in particular, I was praying for a way out. By the time I was seventeen my only ambition was to leave home, move away from the suburbs and get to the bright lights of London fast. From there I was planning on getting to America and marrying Elvis Presley.

“My academic career had been one abject failure after another, but I loved to act and I loved to read. Then in my last year at school for the first time I had an inspirational English teacher, Sister Mary Columba, a tiny young woman who had a passion for W. B. Yeats and a passion for teaching. At the very first seminar, she picked me to read a poem to the class and, as I did, the hairs on the back of my neck tingled. I still have never read anything more beautiful or powerful:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet;

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

“For the first time I really wanted to learn more and over the next two years she guided me to a love of Dickens and E. M. Forster to Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare, and Synge. We were a small tutorial group and every one of us was intensely engaged in her classes. She encouraged my writing, she made me give of my best and with her guidance I was able to challenge others intellectually and to shine.

“These books opened me to a world of possibilities and what intrigued me most was how open‐minded she was. After all, she was a Catholic nun and here we were discussing love and sex and the occult. No subject was taboo. We would spend hours discussing any theme that was thrown up, from the Oedipus complex in Coriolanus to the infidelity in Howards End. For a girl who had rarely been out of Liverpool this was heady stuff.

“I was her top pupil that year and I passed my English exams cum laude. At her suggestion I went on to study drama and literature at college. From then on I never doubted my ability to debate. I had friends for life in the writers we studied and I know that without her wonderful mentoring I would still be looking for Elvis.”

Mentors often appear in people’s lives at opportune times, though, as we saw with Eric Drexler and Marvin Minsky, sometimes “mentees” take an active role in choosing their mentors. Warren Buffett, a man who has himself inspired legions of investors, points to Benjamin Graham (known as the father of security analysis) as his mentor. Graham taught Buffett at Columbia University—giving Buffett the only A‐plus he ever bestowed in twenty‐two years of teaching—and then offered Buffett a job at his investment company. Buffett stayed there several years before heading off on his own. In his book Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein writes, “Ben Graham opened the door, and in a way that spoke to Buffett personally. He gave Buffett the tools to explore the market’s manifold possibilities, and also an approach that fit his student’s temper. Armed with Graham’s techniques, Buffett could dismiss his oracles and make use of his native talents. And steeled by the example of Graham’s character, Buffett would be able to work with his trademark self‐reliance.”

In a different domain entirely, the singer Ray Charles was a guiding light to countless people for his remarkable musical talent and his ability to overcome adversity. His story starts, though, with a man who taught him to tap into the music that was deep inside him.

In an interview with the Harvard Mentoring Project posted on www.WhoMentoredYou.org, Charles recalled, “Wiley Pitt‐man, he was a cat. I mean, if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I’d be a musician today. We lived next door to him. He had a little café, a general store, and he had a piano in there. Every afternoon around 2:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., he’d start to practice. I was three years old and—I don’t know why I loved him, I can’t explain that—but any time he’d start to practicing and playing that boogie woogie—I loved that boogie woogie sound—I would stop playing as a child, I didn’t care who was out there in the yard, my buddies, or whoever, I would leave them, and go inside and sit by him and listen to him play.

“From time to time, I’d start hittin’ the keys with my whole fists and finally he would say to me, ‘Look kid, you don’t hit the keys with your whole fist like this if you like music so much,’ and he knew how much I liked music because I’d stop everything I was doing and listen to him.

“So he started to teach me how to play little melodies with one finger. And, of course, I realize today that he could’ve said, ‘Kid, get away from me, can’t you see I’m practicing?’ But he didn’t. He took the time. Somehow, he knew in his heart, ‘this kid loves music so much, I’m going to do whatever I can to help him learn how to play.’ ”

Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, discovered her mentor when she went away to school at Spelman College, a place she describes as “a staid women’s college that developed safe, young women who married Morehouse men, helped raise a family, and never kicked up dust.” While she was there, she met the history professor Howard Zinn. They were in the South in the late 1950s, and Zinn felt it was important to motivate his students to play an active part in the civil rights struggle.

Inspired by Zinn, Edelman engaged in the early civil rights protests that opened the door to a national movement. Her essential role as a voice for change and justice, and the extraordinary work she has done for children for more than three decades, found its path through the mentorship of Howard Zinn.

I came upon the stories about Ray Charles and Marian Wright Edelman while reading about National Mentoring Month, a campaign orchestrated by the Harvard Mentoring Project of the Harvard School of Public Health, MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Sponsors for the campaign (eight years old, as of January 2009) include many huge corporations. In addition, a large number of major media companies serve as partners, doing everything from offering hundreds of millions of dollars of free public service announcements to incorporating mentoring stories into the plots of television shows.

Public/Private Ventures, a national nonprofit organization focused on improving “the effectiveness of social policies, programs, and community initiatives, especially as they affect youth and young adults,” performed a landmark impact study on mentoring beginning in 2004. Randomly pairing 1,100 fourth‐ through ninth‐graders in more than seventy schools around the country with volunteers from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, they reached some encouraging findings about the value of mentoring. The mentored students improved in overall academic performance, quality of class work, and delivery of homework. They also got into serious trouble in school less often and were less likely to skip school.

It was good to see these results, but they didn’t surprise me at all. Many of these kids probably did better in school simply because they appreciated someone taking an interest in them. This is an essential point, and I’ll come back to it later on when I look at the issues and challenges of education. At the very least, good mentoring raises self‐esteem and sense of purpose. But mentoring takes an elevated role for people when it involves directing or inspiring their search for the Element. What the psychologist saw with Gillian Lynne and what Wiley Pittman saw with Ray Charles was the opportunity to lead someone toward his or her heart’s fulfillment. What Howard Zinn saw with Marian Wright Edelman and Ben Graham saw with Warren Buffett was rare talent that could blossom into something extraordinary if nurtured. When mentors serve this function—either turning a light on a new world or fanning the flames of interest into genuine passion— they do exalted work.

The Roles of Mentors

Mentors connect with us in a variety of ways and remain with us for varying lengths of time. Some are with us for decades in an evolving role that might start as teacher/student and ultimately evolve into close friendship. Others enter our lives at a critical moment, stay with us long enough to make a pivotal difference, and then move on. Regardless, mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us.

The first role is recognition. Charles Strafford served that function in my life, identifying skills that my teachers had not yet noticed. One of the fundamental tenets of the Element is the tremendous diversity of our individual talents and aptitudes. As we’ve discussed earlier, some tests are available that aim to give people a general indication of their strengths and weaknesses based on a series of standardized questions. But the real subtlety and nuances of individual aptitudes and talents are far more complex than any existing tests can detect.

Some people have general aptitudes for music, or for dance, or for science, but more often than not, their aptitudes turn out to be much more specific within a given discipline. A person may have an aptitude for a particular type of music or for specific instruments: the guitar, not the violin; the acoustic guitar, not the electric guitar. I don’t know of any test or software program that can make the kinds of subtle, personal distinctions that differentiate an interest from a potential burning passion. A mentor who has already found the Element in a particular discipline can do precisely that. Mentors recognize the spark of interest or delight and can help an individual drill down to the specific components of the discipline that match that individual’s capacity and passion.

Lou Aronica, my coauthor on this book, spent the first twenty years of his professional life working for book publishers. His first job out of college was for Bantam Books, one of New York’s publishing powerhouses. Not long after he started at the company, he noticed a wizened, gnomish man wandering the halls. The man didn’t seem to have any particular job, but everyone seemed to pay attention to him. Lou finally asked about the man and learned that he was Ian Ballantine, who’d not only founded Bantam Books and later Ballantine Books but was in fact the person who introduced the paperback book to the United States in the 1940s. Over the next couple of years, Lou passed Ballantine in the hall numerous times, nodding to him politely, and feeling a bit intimidated in the presence of a man who was such a legend in his chosen profession.

Lou got his first “real” job at Bantam around this time, a position in the editorial department, trying to piece together a science fiction and fantasy publishing program. One day not long after this, Lou was sitting at his desk when Ian Ballantine strolled in and sat down. This part was surprising enough to Lou. The next several minutes, however, left him stunned. “Ian had a distinctive way of speaking,” Lou told me. “You got the sense that every thought was a pearl, but his language was so circuitous that it seemed the pearl still had the oyster around it.” What became clear as Ballantine continued to speak, though, was that—much to Lou’s astonishment—the publishing legend wanted to take Lou under his wing. “He never actually said, ‘Hey, I’ll be your mentor.’ Ian didn’t make declarative statements like that. But he suggested he might enjoy dropping by regularly, and I made it clear that he could drop by whenever he wanted and that I’d be happy to go halfway across the world to get to him if he didn’t feel like coming to me.”

Over the next several years, Lou and Ian spent a considerable amount of time together. Ballantine taught Lou much about the history and, more importantly, the philosophy of book publishing. One of Ballantine’s lessons to Lou was to “zig when everyone else is zagging,” his way of suggesting that the fastest path to success is often to go against the flow. This struck a special chord with Lou. “From the time I started in the business, I’d been hearing about the ‘conventions’ of book publishing. It seemed there were a lot of rules about what you could and couldn’t do, which didn’t seem to make much sense to me, since readers don’t read by rules. Ian didn’t believe any of that, and he’d been overwhelmingly more successful than the people spouting these rules were. Right then, I decided to become a publisher who would publish books I loved with only a nodding glance to ‘the rules.’ ”

The approach served Lou well. He had his first book imprint by the time he was twenty‐six and became deputy publisher at Bantam and then publisher at Berkley Books and Avon Books before turning his attentions to writing. Before Ian Ballantine chose to mentor him, Lou knew he wanted a career in books. But in addition to teaching him the nuances of the industry, Ballantine helped him identify the particular part of publishing that truly brought him to his Element.

The second role of a mentor is encouragement. Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.

When Jackie Robinson came to play major‐league baseball in Brooklyn for the Dodgers, he experienced levels of abuse and hardship worthy of Greek tragedy from those who believed a black man shouldn’t be allowed to play in a white man’s league. Robinson bore up under most of this, but at one point, things got so bad that he could barely play the game. The taunts and threats rattled his concentration so badly that he faltered at the plate and in the field. After a particularly bad moment, Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, called a time‐out, walked over to Robinson, and offered him encouragement, telling him he was a great ballplayer destined for the Hall of Fame. Years later, during Robinson’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he spoke about that moment. “He saved my life and my career that day,” Robinson said from the podium at Cooperstown. “I had lost my confidence, and Pee Wee picked me up with his words of encouragement. He gave me hope when all hope was gone.”

The third role of a mentor is facilitating. Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes. These mentors might even be our contemporaries, as was the case with Paul McCartney.

“I remember one weekend John and I took the bus across town to see someone who knew how to play B7 on the guitar,” Paul told me. “The three basic chords you needed to know were E, A, and B7. We didn’t know how to do B7 and this other kid did. So we got the bus to see him, learned the chord, and came back again. So then we could play it too. But basically, mates would show you how to do a particular riff. I remember one night watching a TV show called Oh Boy! Cliff Richard and the Shadows were on, playing ‘Move It.’ It had a great riff. I loved it but didn’t know how to play it. Then I worked it out and ran over to John’s house saying, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ That was our only education experience—showing each other how to do things.

“To start with, we were just copying and imitating everyone. I was Little Richard and Elvis. John was Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. I was Phil from the Everly Brothers and John was Don. We just imitated other people and taught each other. This was a big point for us when we were planning the policies at LIPA—the fact that it’s important for students to rub up against people who have actually done or are doing the thing that the students are learning. They don’t really need to tell you much, just show you what they do.”

The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.

James Earl Jones is known as a superlative actor and one of the great “voices” in contemporary media. Yet most of us never would have heard that voice had it not been for a mentor. One can only imagine what Darth Vader might sound like if Donald Crouch hadn’t entered Jones’s life.

As a child, Jones suffered from crippling self‐consciousness, largely because he stuttered and found it very difficult to speak in front of people. When he got to high school, he found himself in an English class taught by Crouch, a former college professor who had worked with Robert Frost. Crouch discovered that Jones wrote poetry, a fact that Jones kept to himself for fear of ridicule from the other boys in school. “He questioned me about why, if I loved words so much, couldn’t I say them out loud?” Jones says in the book The Person Who Changed My Life: Prominent Americans Recall Their Mentors.

“One day I showed him a poem I had written, and he responded to it by saying that it was too good to be my own work, that I must have copied it from someone. To prove that I hadn’t plagiarized it, he wanted me to recite the poem, by heart, in front of the entire class. I did as he asked, got through it without stuttering, and from then on I had to write more and speak more. This had a tremendous effect on me, and my confidence grew as I learned to express myself comfortably out loud.

“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self‐Reliance. This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self‐reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.”

Mentors serve an invaluable role in helping people get to the Element. It might be overstating things to suggest that the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is only a mild overstatement. We all encounter multiple roadblocks and constraints on the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. Without a knowledgeable guide to aid us in identifying our passions, to encourage our interests, to smooth our paths, and to push us to make the most of our capacities, the journey is considerably harder.

Mentorship is of course a two‐way street. As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people. It is even possible that you’ll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people.

Anthony Robbins is one of the world’s most successful personal coaches and mentors, often credited with laying the foundations for the personal coaching profession. This sector is growing exponentially around the world and has become a multimillion‐dollar industry. All of this speaks eloquently to the appetite for mentoring and coaching and to the profound roles these can fulfill in many of our lives. More and more people are discovering that being a mentor, for them, is being in the Element.

This happened for David Neils. His own mentor was Mr. Clawson, a neighbor who came up with multiple successful inventions. When Neils was a child, he would go to visit the neighbor while he worked. Instead of chasing the kid away, Clawson asked for Neils’s advice and criticism about his work. This interaction charged Neils with a sense of self‐worth and an understanding that his opinions mattered. As an adult, Neils founded the International Telementor Program, an organization that facilitates mentoring by electronic means between professionals and students. Since 1995, the program has helped more than 15,000 students around the world receive professional guidance. David Neils literally made mentoring his life’s work.

More Than Heroes

I’m sure that several of the mentors mentioned here, including many of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters, became heroes to those they mentored. We all have personal heroes—a parent, a teacher, a coach, even a schoolmate or colleague—whose actions we idolize. In addition, we all have heroes we’ve never met who stir our imaginations with their deeds. We consider Lance Armstrong a hero for the way he overcame a life‐threatening illness to dominate a physically grueling sport, and Nelson Mandela one for his critical role in ending apartheid in South Africa. In addition, we forever associate people with heroic acts—Rosa Parks’s triumphant stand against bigotry, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

These people inspire us and lead us to marvel at the wonders of human potential. They open our eyes to new possibilities and fire our aspirations. They might even drive us to follow their examples in our lives, moving us to dedicate ourselves to public service, exploration, breaking barriers, or lessening injustice. In this way, these heroes perform a function similar to mentors.

Yet mentors do something more than heroes in our search for the Element. Heroes may be remote from us and inaccessible. They may live in another world. They may be dead. If we meet them, we may be too awestruck to engage properly with them. Heroes may not be good mentors to us. They may be competitive or refuse to have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personal place in our lives. Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.