David Paul lost almost everything when his Hiroshima-based company, David English House, tumbled like a house of cards in 2010. Then, the well-known English-language educator had hit rock bottom after 28 years in business. The bankruptcy cost Paul his home, his life savings and almost his marriage. But instead of packing his bags and quietly returning to his native England, he chalked up the bankruptcy as a learning experience. Today the "Pied Piper" of language education is back in business doing what he loves most — training English-language teachers in Japan.
Five years after graduating in the early 1980s with a master's degree from Cambridge University, Paul moved to Hiroshima to teach English. As a student he had specialized in social psychology and child development. He had been steeped in behavioral psychology, the dominant school of thought at the time.
However Paul wasn't interested in mainstream psychology. Instead, he was secretly indoctrinating himself with the anti-behaviorist ideas of a deceased American psychologist, George Kelly. In the early 1950s, Kelly had developed the theory of personal construct psychology, a branch of constructivism. Constructivism's underlying principle is that we are all naive scientists trying to make sense of the world. We theorize, test and remodel our notion of reality by trial and error.
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