Education: Old Masters in Houston

“Well,” said 82-year-old Carl Gustav Jung in Zurich last week as a tiny microphone was fastened around his neck and a TV camera was wheeled into place, “this is the first time anyone ever had me on a leash.” Then, his white head wreathed in tobacco smoke, the famed analyst leaned back to answer questions and explain the theories that placed him with Freud and Adler in the big three of modern psychology. It was his first experience with TV, and it was for an audience that must have seemed remote indeed. The audience to be convened this fall: citizens of Houston, Texas, who will get the benefit of four filmed Jung lectures over KUHT-TV.

The first noncommercial educational television station in the U.S.. four-year-old KUHT has chalked up quite a record in showing what ETV can do. Sponsored jointly by the University of Houston and the Houston school system, it has put on 56 telecourses, and 9,000 people have signed up for them. Aside from these, there are hours each week of concerts, lectures and forums. Says one KUHT official: “We still hear ‘Who will watch ETV when I Love Lucy is on?’ More people watched a forum on education on KUHT one Monday night than could have been crowded into all the public-school auditoriums in Houston. And they could have seen Robert Montgomery or Lawrence Welk instead.”

Last year KUHT Director John Meaney and University of Houston Psychologist Richard Evans hit upon an idea that should make KUHT the envy of any station. With a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, they set out to put the world’s “great masters” on film. This month they interviewed Freud’s biographer, British Analyst Ernest Jones, 79. Last week they tackled Jung.

Jung and Jones should be only the beginning. Meaney and Evans now hope to film such great masters as T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee and Bernard Berenson. Says Evans dreamily: “Suppose we had had this thing in the 16th century. Why, we could have had Shakespeare. Even more recently, what a boon it would have been to have had Einstein explain relativity.”