Marian Mazur, “Integracja nauczania” (‘The Integration of Teaching’), the weekly Argumenty 1967, no. 12 (458), pp. 1 and 6; from the series “O szkole cybernetycznie” (‘On School, Cybernetically’).
An article from the series on school, about the division of knowledge into subjects. Mazur begins with the observation that the most lasting thing one takes away from school is the conviction that knowledge is kept in separate drawers. The adult carries them over into life: everyone guards their own section, and no one is responsible for the whole. Mazur illustrates this with cases in which sticking exclusively to one's own range of duties did harm.
This is seen best in two examples from engineering. A chemical plant whose effluent threatens the fish in a river, or a dam that changes the landscape and the natural world of a valley, are tasks for which a technical specialist alone will not find a good solution — a naturalist and an economist are needed as well. Both examples illustrate the lesson that Mazur has earlier drawn from cybernetics, from the ubiquity of feedback: when many factors influence one another, a sensible choice is judged by its consequences for the whole, not for a single element. He calls this way of proceeding optimisation and sees in it the everyday occupation of every living system, from a single cell to entire communities. In this, too, he sees the purpose of learning at school: it is to prepare for precisely such choices.
Hence the theme of understanding between technical specialists and humanists. The author defends technology as a field that serves people, reproaches humanists for being unable to think ahead into the future, and lists problems that will require the cooperation of many specialists: overpopulation, free time in the age of automation, the relation of education to work.
The conclusion for teaching: the common language will be neither handicraft lessons for future humanists nor the reading of poems for engineers, but general abstract concepts such as optimisation and decision, diagnosis and prognosis, information, coupling or strategy, as well as diagrams and graphs. The school should teach pupils to see problems as a whole, together with all the consequences of decisions; otherwise it entrenches the habit of confining oneself to one's own slice of duties. The theme of optimisation and decision is developed in Cybernetyka a zarządzanie (‘Cybernetics and Management’, 1969) and in the article “Świadome działanie jako rozwiązanie problemu optymalizacyjnego” (‘Conscious Action as the Solution of an Optimisation Problem’, 1969).