Marian Mazur, “Szkoła bez lęku” (‘School without Fear’), the weekly Argumenty 1966, no. 42 (436), pp. 5 and 10; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
Can the same teacher be both an ally and an examiner to the pupil? Mazur's answer is no, and he proposes that the two roles be separated. A teacher who first explains the lesson, then questions the class and finally hands down the mark loses the pupils' trust over time: the pupil no longer knows whether they are facing a helper or an opponent, and opts for caution. Hence the fear and distrust that the title promises to remove; as an analogy, the author invokes Pavlov's experiment in which an animal lost its bearings.
In the proposed arrangement a machine does the examining, but it is suited only to facts; views take shape in conversation, not through cramming, and conducting such conversation is the teacher's proper work. Beyond that, the teacher is left with the role of a helper and adviser, whom the pupil approaches out of their own need. The distinction between facts and views comes from “Twór skostniały” (‘An Ossified Creation’, 1965).
The separation of roles is made possible by programmed instruction, to which the author had earlier devoted a separate publication. A teaching machine conducts a dialogue with the pupil at the pupil's own pace, and an examining machine asks all the questions provided for and counts the attempts, giving a numerical assessment. The most important argument is the cybernetic one: in the feedback loop between pupil and machine the result depends solely on the pupil's own work, so the mark ceases to be a verdict handed down from outside.
Against this background the author takes traditional examining to task, faulting it for, among other things, its selectiveness, its blurred scope and the impossibility of improving the result until it is right. The consequences of the proposal reach as far as the structure of the school: without lessons, classes and repeating a year, a diligent pupil could finish school earlier. For a reader interested in the theory, the text is an accessible illustration of feedback in teaching; the question of the assimilability of information is given a rigorous treatment in Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (‘A Cybernetic Theory of Autonomous Systems’, 1966).