What does school not teach? According to this posthumously published text, it does not teach decision-making. Mazur draws on the cybernetic division of mental life into informational and decision processes and reproaches the school for dealing exclusively with the former. It therefore brings up a recipient of other people's orders, not someone who sets their own goals and bears the consequences of their choices; a person acquires the ability to make decisions later, on their own, by trial and error, often over a whole lifetime. Practical courses, in which one learns through real decisions in real situations, are for the author proof that it can be done differently.
A second, shorter objection concerns knowledge itself: the school makes pupils remember what anyone can check in a reference source, instead of showing how to acquire knowledge and how to arrive at an opinion of one's own.
The proposals all point in one direction. Pupils should be given real decisions: in a self-government that genuinely decides something, and in discussing with the teacher, as an adviser, undertakings that have failed. The curriculum could include learning to make decisions (the basics of decision theory, design, teamwork), and secondary school should leave pupils more freedom to direct their learning according to their own gifts.
The text appeared in a weekly more than a year after the author's death, as a fragment of a sketch on schooling that Mazur had not managed to publish, with a short editorial note. It is not a design for a new school but a justification of a severe assessment of the existing one. The core of the argument follows from theory, not from observing customs, although the text has no shortage of those: the school trains one kind of mental process and neglects the other, so its graduates can take in information but cannot make choices on that basis. In our reading, this is a concise application to the school of the thread of decisions, present also in the 1969 article on posing optimisation problems and in the 1983 paper on self-regulation at school.
Our own account, working version; definitions of concepts are in the dictionary, with their sources.