Professor Brian Lewis, a founder editor of Instructional Science, died after a considerable period of severe illness, in May, 1986. Sylvia Lewis, who was significantly involved, with Brian, in the intellectual achievements of the Lewis family, survives him.
Genius must have successors to ensure its proper continuity and Brian undoubtedly was a genius. There are many who will try to perform this task. Let no one forget how long it takes for thought, matured and exposed within a narrow circle of colleagues, to achieve the recognition it deserves. And, in this case, that acclamation must occur regardless of the entrenched factions which all too commonly ignore proper thinking and prefer to espouse, badly formulated, but easily grasped, whims of the moment.
And it was Brian's literary habit to start sentences with the word "and"; with which, more personally, I turn to my old and valued friend.
Brian was a kind person. He devoted so much effort to others that one often felt there was little opportunity for him to establish his own position in print. There are, of course, numerous published papers and a probably larger body of written, but as yet unpublished material.
He was born in London on 20 December 1929, and served in the Middle East. I met him about 1959 and he came to work with me at System Research, in Richmond, England from 1960 onwards; still involved with Brian Foss at Birkbeck College, London University, and later on with Basil Bernstein and his linguistic studies. At System Research, we completed the invention and investigation of adaptive man/machine systems and applied them to training, learning, attention directing using personally, as well as job oriented criteria. Several publications of Brian's and some other commentaries adequately reference this work (which, for the record, involves systems far more complex and closely attuned to reality than the currently fashionable but relatively naive arrangements of CAI, CAL, etc...). Of course, we were impressed by the positive results obtained from adaptive man/machine systems but Brian, at least (for he persuaded me to share the view) was even more impressed by the negative result; that, taken to the limit, externally ordained behaviour is not the fun-