Marian Mazur, “Źle z historii” (‘Trouble with History’), the weekly Argumenty 1966, no. 11 (404), pp. 4 and 6; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
What is a knowledge of history supposed to serve? Mazur answers in cybernetic terms: society is a system in which the authorities and the citizens influence one another through feedback, and the exercise of power is a process of control. History is therefore useful insofar as it helps people to control themselves effectively in the present, and that requires prediction.
The most practical conclusion concerns the examination and rests on the division familiar from the series. Facts (who, what, where, when) should form a closed, compulsory list, while the causes of events are a matter of views: they are to be discussed rather than examined. Taking a school anecdote about a mistaken linkage as his occasion, the author explains memorisation by the theory of the correlator: information received many times leaves a stronger trace than information heard once, because each reception increases correlational conductance.
The author sets historians alongside representatives of the sciences that predict the course of phenomena, and reproaches them for being the only ones who make no attempt to do so, confining themselves to an account of events. Yet they could single out typical mechanisms and compare phenomena of one kind; the textbooks take over their attitude.
Since control requires true information, it is worth showing pupils how the same events are described in the textbooks of other countries, and extending political history to include the history of technical civilisation, that is, the influence of transport and communications on the course of events. Another proposal reverses the order of teaching: instead of a chronology that gives the periods hardest to imagine to the youngest pupils, one should proceed from what is most important and from the general to the particular, with a chart of the whole of history on a time scale. Narrative stays, but it is to serve to bring out the mechanism.
The article is an attempt to carry over to a humanities subject the concepts that Mazur develops in his theory: control, true and distorted information, and memorisation. The author will present a classification of distortions of information in his 1967 article on disinformation and in Jakościowa teoria informacji (‘A Qualitative Theory of Information’, 1970); see the entry page disinformation.