Marian Mazur, “Twór skostniały” (‘An Ossified Creation’), the weekly Argumenty 1965, no. 27 (369), pp. 1 and 6; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
What does the value of an education lie in: a stock of facts or the ability to form views? Mazur answers with a distinction to which he returns in later articles in the series: a fact is an answer that cannot be made any more precise, and a view is any other answer. The school overvalues facts, which are easy to find in books, and neglects the ability to form views, in which, unlike the gathering of facts, the homeostat takes part. This division will give rise to the proposals made in the articles on foreign languages, on history and on examining.
The diagnosis in the title concerns the way the school changes. The content of the curricula is updated from time to time, but the aims and methods of teaching and the criteria of their effectiveness have almost stood still, even though science grows like an avalanche, in positive feedback. The author regards the lack of feedback between the school and the pupil as one of the causes: the signal of poor preparation comes back only years later, from the university. One outward symptom of the ossification is the lesson itself, which has lasted the same length of time for half a century.
The yardstick for what the school does with a pupil's time is the cybernetic division of information into useful information, repetition and noise. The time available for learning is limited, so every repetition and every bit of noise takes the place of useful information; and in the school, by the author's approximate estimate, it is noise that predominates. Mazur counts as useful whatever will be of use to the adult.
The conceptual background of the article is the theory of an organism that controls itself thanks to four feedback loops between the environment, the correlator, the homeostat and the accumulator; the editors credit the author with discovering the feedback between the correlator and the homeostat. The school exists so that a person does not have to acquire all knowledge through their own experience. The text is one of the first in the series and announces articles on particular subjects. The dictionary's entry pages give the later, rigorous forms of the concepts: for the organs, from Cybernetyka i charakter (‘Cybernetics and Character’, 1976), and for useful information and redundant information, from Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’, 1970).