on information and knowledge

The primordial and most proprietary processes in any man and, in fact, in any organism, namely “information and “knowledge,” are now persistently taken as commodities, that is as substance. Information is, of course, the process by which knowledge is acquired, and knowledge is the processes that integrate past and present experiences to form new activities, either as nervous activity internally perceived as thought and will, or externally perceivable as speech and movement (Maturana, 1970, 1971; Von Foerster, 1969,1971).
Neither of these processes can be “passed on” as we are told in phrases like “. . . Universities are depositories of Knowledge which is passed on from generation to generation,” etc., for your nervous activity is just your nervous activity and, alas, not mine.
No wonder that an educational system that confuses the process of creating new processes with the dispensing of goods called “knowledge” may cause some disappointment in the hypothetical receivers, for the goods are just not coming: there are no goods.
Historically, I believe, the confusion by which knowledge is taken as substance comes from a witty broadsheet printed in Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century. It shows a seated student with a hole on top of his head into which a funnel is inserted. Next to him stands the teacher who pours into this funnel a bucket full of “knowledge,” that is, letters of the alphabet, numbers and simple equations. It seems to me that what the wheel did for mankind, the Nuremberg Funnel did for education: we can now roll faster down the hill.
Is there a remedy? Of course, there is one! We only have to perceive lectures, books, slides and films, etc., not as information but as vehicles for potential information. Then we shall see that in giving lectures, writing books, showing slides and films, etc., we have not solved a problem, we just created one, namely, to find out in which context can these things be seen so that they create in their perceivers new insights, thoughts, and actions.

in Heinz Von Foerster, 1971, "Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception", Twenty-fourth Annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.