Bill Howard

Dear Rob,
Thanks for Jonathan’s paper. I had not seen it before. There was nothing about it at the
memorial conference. I hope Juliette has a copy.
I am still pondering the paper. As an initial step, I have zeroed in on some items that call
up concrete memories.
“Another very important influence was my father’s experience working as a voluntary
assistant in Bruno Bettelheim’s school for autistic and schizophrenic children in
Chicago. By understanding the extreme case of the damage done to those children, and
how they could be helped, and comparing with many other experiences, he gained an
extraordinary insight into the emotional side of education generally.”
Yes, sometime before I met him, Stan worked for a few months as a counselor in
Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School. We talked about it quite a lot. From his experience as a
counselor, and from Bettelheim himself, Stan became an expert on psychoanalysis; and
I learned a lot from Stan, studied Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”, and in fact use a
version of this (due to Ira Progoff) at appropriate times in my own life. Also, Stan
analyzed two or three of my own dreams. Very impressive.
Agreed that what Stan learned from the Bettelheim experience strongly influenced his
ideas about education.
“Indeed, one could say, that the greater part of scientific education at the University of
Chicago in the 1950s, did not go on in classrooms, but rather in places like Steinway’s
coffeehouse on 57th Street, where my father used to hang out a lot of the time, often
with me tagging along; and where young people could learn most of their physics,
mathematics and chemistry by just sitting at the table with scientists, many of them
already famous ones, arguing and fighting over ideas.”
Yes indeed. I was there. It was Stineway’s drugstore with tables for snacks and coffee,
corner of 57th and Kenwood. More generally, both the undergraduates and the graduate
students learned more from their informal interaction with the faculty and with each
other than they did from actual classroom experience. The educational environment at
the Univ. of Chicago at that time was very unusual.
High school math textbooks: “incoherent, kaleidoscopic, broken up with countless
colored boxes, irrelevant cartoons and arbitrary symbols, supposedly to make them
“interesting” (i.e. distracting) to the child.”
I remember, on the farm, Stan showing me one of them. It was, indeed, pretty bad.
“But then, in Michigan, I fell into trouble, especially in mathematics, and the teachers got
to me. I did not have my father’s defiant character. Instead of fighting back, I caved in.
My father was furious! He saw me being destroyed and finally decided to take me out of
school entirely. That brought him into serious conflict with my mother, …”
I visited Stan’s farm in Michigan a few times, 1960-1962. Jonathan was being “home
schooled”. It did not seem like such a big deal to me. I did not realize that his mother,
Carol, had misgivings about the situation.
“I was lazy and rather spoiled, and spent most of my time running around outside on
the farm.”
He is exaggerating. He was a serious person, mature for his age (9-11). The last time I
saw Jonathan was when I visited Stan at Stony Brook. This was probably 1964.
“(In the sequel, I hopped and jumped in and out of school and home, without finishing
either grade school or high school, sat in on some university courses, finally got
interested in mathematics — particularly Riemann’s theory of functions of a complex
variable and analytical number theory –, learned to work hard, finished a doctorate at
the University of California and left, at the age of 22, for a teaching position in Europe. …
)”
Jonathan got his doctorate under Bishop in 1973. I would like to know more about his
experience with Bishop. Stan was talking a lot about Bishop during those years, in
particular in connection with the project of creating a new university. Stan recounted
some of this to me (ie., his conversations with Bishop) during the late 1960s.
“One of the people who felt particularly resentful and threatened by my father was the
wife of a faculty colleague, who was trying to build herself a career in “computer
science”. The particular colleague, while very brilliant, had a history of mental illness.
Now, his wife went to my mother and confided to her, that she recognized the same
symptoms of “manic-depressive psychosis” in my father, as her own husband had
suffered from! …
To make a long story short, my mother demanded that he go with her to see a
university psychiatrist for “consultation”. Smelling an attempt by Wallis et al. to obtain a
pretext for removing him from his tenured position at the University — mental illness
being one of the two legal justifications for such a move — my father demanded that I
go along as a witness ..
.” Wow! Reads like a novel; but also has the ring of truth.
The educational films: Stan talked to me about this but I found it hard to relate to; it was
not the sort of thing that I was very interested in. I remember him recounting a
conversation with Gödel, who said, concerning the opposition he would encounter from
the entrenched commercial interests, “They will destroy you *instantly*.”
Concerning the importance of fostering the ability of children to “think things through
by and for themselves — the sovereignty of their minds –“: well, of course. I don’t
recall Stan emphasizing this, but he probably did; it is just so obvious to me that I would
not have noticed.
The fight at the IAS: As mentioned in my talk to the memorial conference, I was there
during the year 1972-1973. Lots of memories from that year.
I have not had any contact with Jonathan since Stony Brook, 1964. I should send him an
email. Could you give me the address?
Bill