Marian Mazur, “Źle z języków obcych” (‘Trouble with Foreign Languages’), the weekly Argumenty 1965, no. 40 (381), pp. 2 and 3; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
Could a school that struggles to cope with two foreign languages teach four? Mazur maintains that it could: an educated Pole needs English, French, German and Russian, and the school can pass on all four, provided that its method changes thoroughly. The starting point is the distinction familiar from “Twór skostniały” (‘An Ossified Creation’): knowledge of a language is a set of facts, not of views, because for every word, form or phrase it can be settled whether the pupil knows it.
This distinction and the second premise, discussed below, underlie a curriculum of a strict, carefully selected minimum of words and phrases, mastered without exception. Mazur sketches a plan in which four languages fit into eight years of school, and adds a few practical remarks, among them on cutting back Latin and on using a dictionary freely.
The second premise comes from information theory. Since an information path has a limited throughput, in a given time a pupil will take in only a certain number of words, so the choice of words must be very careful. It is better to give fewer words and be certain that the pupil knows all of them than to bury the pupil under a far larger number, of which no one knows what has remained; the unassimilated remainder is informational noise and wasted time.
The text shows clearly how Mazur turns cybernetic concepts into decisions about teaching. The resource that has to be managed is the pupil's time. The same division into facts and views returns in “Źle z historii” (‘Trouble with History’) and in “Szkoła bez lęku” (‘School without Fear’, 1966), where the checking of facts is taken over by a machine. The rigorous form of the concept of useful information, on which the second premise rests, will be given in Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’, 1970).