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Writing a Journal of Memories: The Education of a Teacher

[Publisher’s Note: What you see on this page is the beginning of a publication project Dr. Howard Stein was preparing for David Boles Blogs in the year 2000 upon the celebration of the occasion of his birth — July 4 — when he was 78-years-old. We have unearthed this early draft of — The Howard Stern Journal of Memories — and we share it with you today so you may not only enjoy Dr. Stein’s wisdom, but also revel in the revision process you can see below in an image of his typewritten submission. You may view a larger size of the image on the Boles.com Howard Stein Archive Page.

Howard’s health began to nag him as the days aged, and he never returned to this project, but you may still read a lot of Dr. Stein’s work here, there and elsewhere. Howard Stein died on October 12, 2012 of heart failure. He was 90. We miss him every moment of every notion and it is amazing that 15 years after he wrote this for us, Howard is still publishing with us from the grave. Howard Stein always said he was “born lucky” — and so, too, are we lucky to have this article! — but this is his story.]

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The University as Hospital: An Inalienable Obligation

[Publisher’s Note: Howard Stein, Boles Blogs author and inspiration, died at age of 90 on October 14, 2012 in Stamford, Connecticut. This article now appears in print as an equalizing effort to preserve Dr. Stein’s teaching and thinking as David Boles shares this, and other works, from his private Prairie Voice archive. Howard wrote this article in the Spring of 1984 and, 30 years later, the lessons are still ripe and rich and damning.] 

For those suffering the wounds of life, the university has become a hospital.  For the woman in her middle forties whose husband has left her for “a young thing” after twenty-four years of marriage and four children, the university is the first thought where she may go for help.

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The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good

[Publisher’s Note: Boles Blogs author Howard Stein died on October 14, 2012 at 90 years of age.  In an ongoing effort to preserve his legacy and memory, David Boles is sharing articles and preserving other works from his private Prairie Voice archive. The following article was likely written by Dr. Stein in the early 1980’s — and his point still rings true, and still bites us with a bitter hardness of the flat truth — three decades later.]

Public education in the minds of the parents, schoolboards, teachers, and local politicians seems to have as its purpose either the preparing of the young for higher education (preferably private education), or the preparing of the young for a variety of jobs and trades.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Why Playwrights Must Experiment with the Audience

[Author’s Note: This is a portion of a speech I gave to the Southeast Theatre Conference in 2000.]

In Robert Aulett’s play, Alberta Radiance, Alberta speaks the opening like, “I have this human life to live, and I don’t know what to do with it.”  The operative word is human, as in “the human condition,” “the human predicament” or “the human comedy.”  When we utter such expressions, we assume the listener knows what we mean, but in my 78 years of living, I have never heard anyone explain what that “human” condition, predicament, comedy or life is.

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Dr. Howard Stein on Golf and the Principle of Consideration

It’s spring, and an old man’s fancy turns to thoughts of golf.  My thoughts concentrate on three conditions that no longer seem to exist, neither in golf nor in the society.  Golf, as the game was designed and expected to be played, is out of sync, out of joint, with the society determined to paralyze the game.

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Dr. Howard Stein and the Habit of Intelligent Choice

At the end of the nineteenth century, in a graduation speech to Barnard College graduates, William James made the following statement:

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Dr. Howard Stein on Owning the Subject

In a conversation with Robert Chapman many years ago, he who was the co-author of the play, Billy Budd, and the director of the Loeb Theatre at Harvard University, I mentioned a playwright whose work seemed limited to me.

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Thinking About September 11, 2001 & 2002

On September 11 we commemorate the loss of thousands of people to an unnatural disaster. Every year the human race suffers the loss of thousands of people to natural disasters — floods, earthquakes, blizzards, mudslides, tornadoes, hurricanes — disasters that we have very little chance of avoiding and no one to blame; only Nature.

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The Heart of this Nation

My brother, Frank, will be ninety in December. He was a math teacher in high school for ten years and a teacher of rhetoric, speech, and theatre in college for thirty years. He lives in a nursing facility in Florida, where with the help of nurses, nurses’ aids, doctors, and the kindness of strangers his mind is active despite a frail body.

I, his baby brother age seventy-six, am his power-of-attorney and speak to him as often as I possibly can.

Yesterday I spoke to him early in the day, and he was completely dispirited.

“Babe,” he said, “I can’t bare it any more. That horrible incident in Oregon crushes me. Would you do me a favor? Would you write something that I have been preaching for decades now?”

“I’ll do anything I can for you,” I answered.

“Maybe you could send it to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times or The Saturday Review?,” he said.

“The Saturday Review is not likely, Frank,” I said without explaining. “But I will send whatever you say to The Times.”

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Dreams

Dreams are okay
as long as they pay.