I enjoyed reading the article, mostly for the wealth of historical information, which I did not know before. While I cannot say that I am a history buff, I am intrigued with concepts and their origins - especially how they relate to the world today.
Immediately from the first few pages, I did not know about the U.S. government's role with educational radio in the 1930s. Considering how much of the today's existing educational programs on the radio (podcasts) or television are done either through public & private universities or corporations, I really never considered how educational radio might have looked in its infancy. I guess now any participation the US government has in such educational content is typically remembered by specific commercial campaign ads related to individual concerns. For example, there was been a recent (a year or so) campaign on the Internet & television produced by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and the CDC to teach children how to prevent catching the H1NI virus.
The second thing I did not know was the idea of correspondence education. Again, it never occurred to me of the obvious methods for instruction based upon the times of the early 1900s. It seems to me that for those who were ambitious enough and had the means, certainly this type of learning was available. When I did a Wikipedia search to learn more about this, I uncovered that in the United States a woman was responsible for establishing one of the first correspondence schools, and the courses were only open to women. Anna Eliot Ticknor was the daughter of a Harvard professor and founded the Society to Encourage Studies at Home in 1873. Considering the limited status women may have had at this time, I was impressed with this woman’s ambition, entrepreneurship, and dedication towards teaching all classes of women.
The third fact I came away with reading the article was how educational radio supported early farmers. Like the other two facts, it makes sense that educational content or even news would have been dispersed by any technological method current at the time. I suppose in a way radio, although primitive by today’s standards, worked just fine since one would need to pay careful attention to agricultural updates, weather and the like.
A very enlightening article, and one I will need to reread again in order to digest the immense historical background.
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