| Australian Journal of Educational Technology 1998, 14(1), 1-24. |
AJET 14 |
This article is an historical analysis of the application of broadcast radio to education. It traces the haphazard development of broadcasting in Australian through various regulatory systems introduced by Federal Governments between 1923 and 1932, which culminated in the adoption of a dual public-private system with the establishment of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). It also analyses the ABC's policy and practice in programming with particular reference to education. It shows that the Australian pioneers of educational broadcasting in the 1930s were slow to take advantage of the fund of knowledge accumulated in Britain in the previous decade. Their early efforts, it is argued, suffered because of this. Finally, the article discusses the emergence of innovative approaches to the technology at the Federal level of the ABC, including the development of sound-and-vision educational programs.
| 1920 | Demonstration broadcasts are conducted in Australia. |
| 1921 | Regular experimental broadcasts commence in Australia. |
| 1923 | Federal Government establishes 'sealed set' scheme for regular broadcasting services. |
| 1924 | 'Sealed set' scheme is abandoned. Government establishes 'A' and 'B' Class system. 2FC broadcasts educational programs to 13 schools in Sydney. |
| 1929 | 'A' and 'B' Class system is abandoned. Government contracts Australian Broadcasting Company to provide a national service. Attempts to establish school broadcasts in Victoria and New South Wales fail. |
| 1931 | Australian Broadcasting Company establishes school broadcasts in Victoria. |
| 1932 | Contract with Australian Broadcasting Company is not continued. Government establishes Australian Broadcasting Commission. |
| 1933 | ABC launches national school broadcasting service in Vic., N.S.W, Qld. and S.A. |
| 1935 | ABC school broadcasts have been extended to all states. |
| 1937 | ABC establishes Federal Department of School Broadcasts under Rudolph Bronner. |
The sealed set scheme was an unpopular device to ensure that stations generated revenue. Radio was an exciting new scientific marvel and people wanted the freedom to scan the frequency spectrum rather than having their sets locked onto a single station. Between August 1923 and June 1924 only 1,400 listeners entered the sealed set scheme, while in the same period the Postmaster-General's Department received some 5,000 applications for 'Experimental Licences' from people 'who could not be properly classified as experimenters'.[4] An Experimental Licence entitled the holder to own and use a tunable receiving set and, thus, listen to any station. In July 1924, the Government succumbed to public pressure and abandoned the sealed set scheme establishing a system of 'A' and 'B' Class stations. Stations of both classes would be privately owned and could earn revenue from advertising. The difference between the two was that 'A' Class stations would derive the bulk of their revenue from listeners' licence fees (their broadcasting of advertisements being restricted to no more than a total of one hour per day), while 'B' class stations would be totally dependent on advertising.[5]
The Australian reaction to the introduction of broadcasting was most enthusiastic. By the middle of 1926, 130,000 people had listening licences; two years later there were 270,000. In Victoria there were over 137,000 licence-holders which represented almost eight per cent of the state's population[6] and gave it the distinction of having a 'higher proportion of registered listeners than any other place in the world where such figures were kept'.[7] By July 1929, there were 310,000 licence holders[8] and twenty-six radio stations in twelve cities.[9] The 'A' and 'B' class system, however, did not fulfil all expectations which had been vested in broadcasting. Radio was to have reached out to all Australians, but by the late 1920s this was far from being achieved.
The 'A' and 'B' class system favoured the more populous states. 'B' class stations, which were totally dependent on advertising, were understandably clustered in highly populated areas where the numbers of businesses were greater and markets larger. 'A' class stations received their revenue from licences from a state, not a national, pool. Thus the two 'A' class stations in Victoria, where there were 140,000 licensed listeners, were well funded, while the single 'A' class stations in the less populated states struggled to provide a service. Western Australia's only 'A' class station, 6WF, for example, could not achieve financial viability under the system and, in December 1928, the Post-Master General's Department bought out its owners, Western Farmers Ltd., in order to keep it on the air.
A 1927 Royal Commission into broadcasting had recommended 'the pooling of a portion of the licence fees of all States, with the object of guaranteeing a minimum revenue to the companies in each State'.[10] But, despite Government pressure, the 'A' class companies could not reach agreement on a system to implement the recommendation. The pending expiration of the four Sydney and Melbourne 'A' class licences in mid-1929 provided the Government with an opportunity to intervene. In July 1928, it announced a plan to acquire all 'A' Class station facilities and establish a National Broadcasting Service. While the stations comprising the National Broadcasting Service would be government owned, programming would be provided under contract by a private sector organisation. Tenders were called in May 1929, and the contract was awarded to a consortium of Union Theatres Limited, Fuller's Theatres Limited and the music publishers, J. Albert and Son, which commenced operation as the Australian Broadcasting Company in July 1929. The contract was for a period of three years ending on 30 June 1932.[11]
The contract was not extended. According to Ian Mackay, the Australian Broadcasting Company had performed creditably in unifying the disparate services of the various 'A' class companies throughout Australia.[12] Progress, however, had not come fast enough in extending the National Service beyond the metropolitan areas. By the end of the three-year contractual period only four regional stations had been established. Mackay wrote:
Time was not on the side of the company and they could not extend their facilities to the country areas quickly enough to keep pace with the demand of listeners. Only in this respect had private enterprise failed.[13]The Company's demise, however, was rather the result of its own initiative than the Government's. The establishment of new station facilities was not its responsibility but that of the Government through the Post-Master General's Department. The Company, therefore, could hardly have been held responsible for any lack of expansion. The PMG had actually been scheduled to establish sixteen new stations during the life of the contract, but had failed to do this. The Company's principals themselves, disappointed that the revenue derived from licences had not reached their expectations, decided not to seek a renewal of the contract. Instead, they planned to establish a national commercial network and had already commenced in this endeavour by purchasing the 'B' class station 2UW in Sydney before the expiration of the National Service contract.[14]
In his history of the ABC, Kenneth Inglis points out that the Australian Broadcasting Company's withdrawal suited the Scullin Labor Government.[15] There was, at the time, on both the Labor and conservative sides of politics, a strong attraction to the BBC model.[16] Thus, as soon as the Australian Broadcasting Company indicated its intention not to seek a renewal of the contract for the provision of programs over the National Service, the Government commenced preparing legislation for an Australian version of the British Broadcasting Corporation. On 17 May 1932, the necessary legislation was enacted and on 1 July 1932 the Australian Broadcasting Company's twelve stations were taken over by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Thus was born Australia's public-private broadcasting system, which represented a hybrid of the American and British systems.
The Commission shall provide and shall broadcast from the national broadcasting stations adequate and comprehensive programmes and shall take in the interests of the community all such measures as, in the opinion of the Commission, are conducive to the full development of suitable broadcasting programmes.[17]The Government provided little to assist in the interpretation of this vague directive. Music was the only area of programming in relation to which the ABC was given a firm direction. 'The Commission', it was stated in Section 24 of the Act, 'shall endeavour to establish and utilise... groups of musicians for the rendition of orchestral, choral and band music of high quality'.[18] Though not directed to conduct a news service, according to Section 22, the ABC could collect 'news and information relating to current events in any part of the world'.[19] It could not broadcast advertisements, according to Section 21, but that was not to be 'construed as preventing the Commission from broadcasting... a programme supplied by any organisation, firm or person engaged in artistic, literary, musical or theatrical production or educational pursuits'.[20] What constituted 'adequate and comprehensive programmes' was left largely to the interpretation of five Commissioners and the senior managers they appointed.
There was, then, no provision in the Act which specifically required or empowered the ABC to produce and broadcast educational programs. The only reference to education, as noted, was contained in Section 21, which dealt with advertising. The ABC could broadcast programs supplied by an organisation engaged in 'educational pursuits'.[21] As for any educational programs generated within the ABC itself, these could be justified by the requirement in the Act to broadcast 'adequate and comprehensive programmes', but so could any other kinds of broadcasts. As Clement Semmler observes, 'the wording of the Act enables the ABC to broadcast almost anything that it wishes'.[22]
Since 1923, Federal Governments, both Labor and conservative[23], had demonstrated an incapacity to come to terms with broadcasting. The formation of the ABC was the fourth attempt to establish a broadcasting system appropriate to Australia's needs, but no attempt was made to establish what these needs were. 'Australia', writes Semmler, 'was given a so-called "dual system" of broadcasting without any attempt whatever to seek the advice of distinguished figures of the day in fields of education and culture or, for that matter, significant sections of business and industry'.[24] The new system was introduced without any substantial policy development in relation to the functions of the national broadcaster. The best the Government of the day could offer the ABC by way of guidance was informal advice to emulate the BBC. 'Walk in the footsteps of the BBC and fall in behind Britain' was the advice given to the Commission's first chairman, Charles Lloyd Jones, by the Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, in 1932.[25] It did not occur to Lyons or any other member of his Government that the difference between Australian and British conditions might necessitate more formal guidance for the ABC.
In line with the Prime Minister's advice, the ABC undertook in BBC style to 'enlighten' Australian society. It had, as the Commission described it in its first Annual Report, 'the important national duty of improving standards of culture and education in Australia'.[26] Education, then, was accepted by the ABC as one of its essential functions, and it determined that it would fulfil this function in two ways:
The Commission has realised that it has a certain responsibility in the matter of public education, since it controls a facility for spreading information upon every subject to thousands of citizens. Consideration has accordingly been given to the manner in which this duty may best be discharged. One of the conclusions arrived at is that the most satisfactory method of education is the enlargement of interest rather than the mere presentation of information... However, it was felt, too, that direct assistance could be rendered to those who were engaged upon the great work of education in its more limited and more popular sense.[27]Thus, the ABC adopted the BBC's concept of education 'in both the wider and narrower sense'.[28]
From the beginning, the ABC was far more aware of the need for entertainment than the BBC. The environment which it had entered was very different from that in which British broadcasting had developed. With a large commercial sector already in place and rapidly expanding in Australia, the ABC was denied the 'brute force of monopoly' which had enabled the BBC's Managing Director, John Reith, to introduce and sustain, against considerable opposition, his 'educative' and educational programming.[29] The ABC was operating in a highly competitive environment. 'The audience is not compellable', observed the Commission. 'The turning of a dial or the throwing of a switch by the listener can put an immediate end to any item which is being broadcast, however edifying it may be'.[30] In the major population centres of Australia, dissatisfied listeners could change to one of several commercial stations, the primary purpose of which was to attract large audiences for their advertisers through entertainment.
The Commission, therefore, set itself the task of making entertainment an 'inseparable element' of its programs.[31] As it observed:
If good work is to be done it must be done by pleasing listeners. Enlightenment must come through entertainment. The Commission therefore aims to develop side by side its two ideals of pleasing and benefiting, and this it hopes to do by continually striving to render its service pleasing and its pleasing serviceable; it will seek to appeal not to each section of the community in turn, but to all sections at all times...[32]The Commission's goal to make its programs entertaining was achievable, but, as shown later, it was not fulfilled in the bulk of educational broadcasts during the 1930s. The goal to appeal to 'all sections' of the community 'at all times', however, was not feasible, for the ABC was failing, as the BBC had done, to distinguish between sectional and general interests. Educational broadcasts and other programs designed to 'enlighten' would appeal to segments of the potential audience and, thus, there was a fundamental inconsistency between the ABC's 'duty' to contribute to the educational development of the community and its goal to attract mass audiences.
The Victorian 'Education Hour' and a similar series in Sydney did not continue into 1930[36] because they failed to convince educators of the value of educational broadcasting. In its 1930 Year Book, in rather direct terms, the Company put the failure down to educational conservatism and expressed its hopes as follows for the acceptance of educational broadcasting in Australia in the near future:
In every country when broadcasting first established itself, the conservative element in educational circles looked upon the suggestion of using wireless as an accessory to their activities as nothing short of heresy... Even yet there is not a full realization of the advantages of wireless in education in this country, but at no late date it is hoped that the broadcasting services will be as freely used in the schools here as in some of the overseas countries.[37]The Company was clearly aware of overseas developments in educational broadcasting. The reference to the 'conservative element in educational circles' overseas confirms this, as does another reference to advances made by the Scottish educational authorities, which had 'linked up practically every school under their control in a system of regular broadcast lessons'.[38] It is likely that this interest in overseas experience was stimulated by the failure of its 'Education Hour'. Had those responsible for launching this series been informed of the recent history of educational broadcasting in Britain, they might have anticipated an apathetic or possibly obstructionist approach on the part of educational authorities and teachers. They might also have realised the necessity of involving them in the planning process. The BBC had begun to set up local Education Advisory Committees, as early as 1923, in order to facilitate the development of educational broadcasting.
In 1931, the Company tried again by launching an 'experiment of broadcasts for schools' in Victoria.[39] This time, it adopted two British strategies to gain the co-operation of the educational authorities and acceptance by teachers. Firstly, a Committee on Educational Broadcasting was set up under the State Director of Education.[40] Secondly, to remove any misgivings on the part of teachers regarding the programs the Committee provided a clear statement on the purpose of educational broadcasting in its Talks Syllabus booklet. There was, it stated, following the BBC line almost verbatim, 'no desire to make broadcast lessons compulsory or to suggest that they can be used to replace personal instruction by competent teachers'. Educational broadcasting was 'a supplement to the efforts of the teacher, justified only in so far as it [supplied] information and mental stimulus beyond the ordinary resources of the school'.[41]
'The assurance was necessary', as Inglis points out, 'for there was still scepticism and suspicion within Education Departments about the use of radio in the classroom'.[42] A cartoon of the day showed a recalcitrant student saying to a teacher: 'I'm not going to let you learn me any more - see! I'm going to have radio lessons!!'.[43] Former ABC Director of Education, Frank Watts, gave another example: 'It is on record that after a very successful experiment with a borrowed set at one school, the headmaster's proposal that a set be purchased was turned down by the School Committee on the grounds 'that the wireless broadcasts would take the place of the teacher [sic] and the school would be staffed by Junior Teachers'.[44]
The Committee on Educational Broadcasting not only sought to allay the concerns of teachers, but actually sought their active co-operation as participants in the experiment in education by radio:
School broadcasting is in the stage of experiment and inquiry. Before any valid conclusions can be drawn as to the scope and methods in broadcast lessons, it will be necessary to enlist the co-operation of many teachers and to gather the experience of many schools.[45]The approach adopted was a sound one: radio did not represent a threat to teachers' jobs; what was being presented to them was an experiment in which they would have a significant input.
The Committee would certainly have been aware of the 1927 Kent Experiment in Britain, which had been the BBC's response to its failure to gain a general acceptance of school broadcasting. This ground-breaking experiment enabled the BBC Education Department to observe what happened at the 'listening end' in twenty urban and fifty-two rural schools, and to test the reactions of students and teachers to different program types and methods of delivery. The major outcome of this investigation was that the broadcast lecture was shown to be an ineffective use of radio. Successful school broadcasts, it was discovered, were those that both entertained and imparted knowledge and skills.[46]
Any influence from the BBC investigation on the Victorian experiment was only superficial. The Committee did not rigorously investigate the effectiveness of its broadcasts at the listeners' end, but relied on voluntary responses from teachers. In the first year of the experiment, it was more concerned with ascertaining information on numbers of listeners.[47] As shown later in this article, a preoccupation with the reach of educational broadcasting and a relative neglect of program quality had important implications for the direction in which educational broadcasting developed in Australia in the early years. The 1931 experimental broadcasts in Victoria did succeed, however, in overcoming the opposition of teachers, and they represent the foundation of school broadcasting in Australia.
The programs were thirty minutes in duration and were broadcast at 3.30 p.m. from Monday to Friday over station 3AR in Melbourne. They were aimed at secondary students and included the following subjects: Australian Problems (Geographic, Economic, Historical), English Language and Composition, French, Science, Musical Appreciation, Intermediate Geography, English Literature, Mathematics and Physical Science, and Intermediate History. Thus, when the Australian Broadcasting Commission took over the Company's operations in 1932, it inherited an embryonic system of educational broadcasting. It immediately set out to extend this service to the rest of Australia. Following the British model, an officer was appointed to supervise educational broadcasting at the national level in 1932 and School Broadcast Advisory Committees were then set up in the states. In May 1933, the ABC launched its national school broadcasting service in Victoria and New South Wales and, later that year, in Queensland and South Australia.[48] The service had been extended to all Australian states by 1935.[49]
Good reception was the sine qua non of educational broadcasting, but obtaining a clear signal was not a straightforward matter in the early 1930s. At this time, operating a radio set was a somewhat complex affair as the following advice for listeners from the Australian Broadcasting Company indicates:
DON'T connect your earth to the same point as that used by your neighbour.
DON'T try to communicate with your neighbour by making your receiver howl.
DON'T use a longer aerial than necessary if you have strength to spare.
DON'T vary your strength of reception by distuning your receiver. It spoils the quality and is liable to increase interference in your set.
DON'T try to work a loud-speaker from a plain single-valve set.
DON'T fiddle with your set if the results are satisfactory.
DON'T forget that it is impossible practically to get true reproduction when receiving in the 'silent point'.
DON'T forget that when you oscillate you are running the risk of having your licence cancelled.
DON'T use a super-heterodyne receiver on an ordinary aerial. A frame aerial is essential.
DON'T compensate for the running down of your batteries (both high and low tension) by increasing reaction. If you do this your set may oscillate when switched on after standing idle for a few hours.[50]
In its 1931 'Notes for Teachers', the Victorian Committee on Educational Broadcasting stressed 'that all teachers who are responsible for the selection and maintenance of a school receiver should both realize what good reception is, and know how to secure it'.[51] Three years later the same message was still being conveyed to teachers:
Good reception is essential to the success of school broadcasting. The Committee is satisfied that, if proper precautions are observed, the voice of a broadcast speaker may be heard by a listening class as clearly and effectively as if he were actually in their own schoolroom speaking to them.[52]The need to provide technical support for teachers was recognised early on and a Technical Sub-Committee was established in Victoria in 1931. New South Wales followed this example in 1933. Teachers were encouraged to contact these Sub-Committees for advice on the type of radio set to purchase and measures to take to ensure clear reception. Thus, considerable effort was made to ensure that the technology was not an impediment to its own introduction.
Educational material could be 'put over' the radio in several ways. In 1934, an American educationist, F. H. Lumley, developed the following 'sixfold classification of educational methods employed in broadcasting':[54]
| (1) | Straight radio lessons where the broadcasting teacher is temporarily substituted for the regular classroom teacher; |
| (2) | radio talks in which subjects of somewhat general interest are discussed for pupils in schools or for adults; |
| (3) | recitations or readings used chiefly in English classes or for instruction in foreign languages; |
| (4) | dialogues, interviews, debates, and conversations used to present contrasting points of view or to make instruction more interesting by giving greater variety to the voices and permitting the method of question and answer; |
| (5) | dramatizations and plays for both children and adults; |
| (6) | musical programs with comments and explanations.[55] |
All these and more would eventually come to be used by the ABC, but, in the early years, the 'straight radio lesson' and the 'radio talk' were the dominant program types. 'The right material put over in the right way' was typically a lecture read by a locally recognised authority on a particular subject. J. C. Stobart, the BBC's first Director of Education, had supported the lecture format for educational broadcasting, but the Kent Experiment had revealed that there were far more effective approaches. These included such formats as the dialogue, interview, debate, conversation, dramatisation and play listed by Lumley above.
With complete disregard for the benefits that might be derived from studying the experience of the BBC, the ABC set out to re-invent educational programming by promoting the lecture as the ideal form for radio lessons. Before the print revolution, it was argued, the spoken discourse had been the sole means of group instruction. Through radio it could become a means of mass instruction. There was, as the Victorian Committee on Educational Broadcasting expressed it, a romantic hope for a return to the days of the great educational orators:
We are apt to forget that it is only during the last four hundred years that education has become so closely associated with book learning. The development of broadcasting has brought into prominence once more the importance of the spoken word. In the twelfth century Peter Abelard attracted thousands of students to Paris from all parts of Western Europe to hear his wonderful discourses... Perhaps, through the agency of broadcasting, successors will be found to these great men of the past who were able to speak to and move multitudes. While the listening groups in those days were numbered by hundreds and sometimes thousands, modern science has made it possible for the spoken voice to reach millions.[56]The reality was, however, that very few, if any, 'wonderful discourses' reached the ears of students in the early broadcasts.
Throughout the 1930s, the vast majority of educational programs were delivered by untrained and inexperienced broadcasters and were typically produced, as Frank Watts described it, in a quite perfunctory manner:
Once a speaker had been assigned a topic, he was largely left to himself. The broadcasts were almost always straight talks, no demands were made for scripts, the speaker arrived in the studio at the appointed time, spoke into a microphone for an agreed number of minutes and then left.[57]The ABC was certainly not fulfilling its commitment that all programs, including educational broadcasts, would be entertaining. Had it sought to take advantage of the British experience during the previous decade, it would have discovered that this was essential. In failing to 'walk in the footsteps of the BBC' in this area, the ABC ignored valuable prior experience.
That educational broadcasting survived its early years was due in large degree to the efforts of some committed classroom teachers. 'Relatively little was known of the audience', writes Frank Watts, 'except that it was growing, largely due to the enthusiasm of some of the teachers.'[58] 'The full co-operation of the teacher in the classroom' (the News South Wales Advisory Council's second condition to the success of educational broadcasting) was given when it was most needed and least deserved, that is, at a time when the quality of programs was generally so poor that teacher support was essential. The typical lecture format of programs exacerbated communication problems caused by radio's inability to provide visual contact and personal interaction between speaker and listener. Teachers could, however, compensate to some extent for this to facilitate the assimilation by their students of the information presented.
Along the lines promoted by the BBC, teachers were encouraged to prepare materials for visual support before broadcasts. 'See that arrangements are made', they were advised, 'for the provision of the maps, apparatus, etc., and that when black-board notes or lists of difficult words are given, these are written up on the black-board beforehand.'[59] Effective, key-word note-taking was encouraged. Teachers were advised to conduct comprehensive revision activities to assist students to recall the 'transient auditory impressions' carried by the broadcasts. These activities were to include the drawing of diagrams and maps and the making of models as well as quizzes on program content. There was even a suggestion by the New South Wales Educational Broadcasts Advisory Council in 1933 to convert the broadcasts back to print for the purpose of revision by using a shorthand writer where one was available.[60]
While the lecture was the typical form of the broadcasts, some of the early programs did attempt to generate interactivity by seeking to elicit responses and leading students in songs. The classroom teacher was also charged with the responsibility of ensuring such activities succeeded. The Victorian Committee offered the following advice in 1931:
Do all within your power to collaborate in sustaining the attention of the children. In some lessons the broadcast speaker will give oral exercises or lead the class in the singing of songs. Encourage the children to take part in these exercises. Where questions are asked, encourage the children to reply aloud either in chorus or individually (picking out individuals in the usual way) as the conditions require.[61]Children, however, could listen attentively to broadcasts without the physical intervention of adults; and they did so in their thousands from the early days of radio.
According to the First Annual Report of the ABC, children were 'among the keenest and most appreciative of wireless audiences'.[62] Special afternoon programs for children became a feature on most radio stations during the 1920s. These programs, as Lesley Johnson observes, exploited fully the capacity of radio to stimulate the imagination of its listeners:
In many ways these children's programs were the most innovative of the early forms of broadcasting. Broadcasters took on names (and personas) like Miss Kookaburra, Miss Mary Gumleaf and Billy Bunny and endeavoured to create a fantasy radio world for their audiences. The emphasis on spontaneity, on the unrehearsed, on the relaxed and the friendly, and the invitation to young listeners to enter this imaginary world, exploited wireless broadcasting as a new medium more fully than did other early programmes.[63]As BBC educational broadcasters had recognised in the late 1920s, radio had stimulated the development of new, entertaining approaches to communicating with children. By the mid-1930s, the use of microphone personas, dramatisation, sound effects, on-location broadcasts and interviews had become accepted approaches in the production of children's programs in Australia, but not of school broadcasts. Thus, the pioneers of educational broadcasting in using the surrogate teacher model for their broadcasts failed to exploit radio's capacity to develop interactivity through imagination.
Radio is a new medium of public instruction. It cannot be adapted to the grooves and ruts of present educational methods; but it can be used with incalculable profit by educators who are flexible enough to learn and obey its peculiar demands.[65]The BBC had understood the importance of this principle since 1927. Good educational broadcasting, it had discovered through the Kent Experiment, had to incorporate the features of good, communicative radio.
In Australia, throughout the 1930s, the vast majority of educational broadcasts, both for school and adult audiences, consisted of broadcast instruction. The broadcaster simply lectured to listeners. Thus, in the case of most school programs, despite the claim that the aim of educational broadcasting was not to 'replace personal instruction', the broadcaster did just that, taking over the class as teacher and proceeding to instruct the students. The terms used to describe the broadcaster, namely, 'the teacher at the microphone' and 'the broadcast teacher' were appropriate.[66]
In 1939, the head of ABC's Federal Department of School Broadcasts, Rudolph Bronner, repeated the claim of a decade before that 'the school broadcast is designed to supplement, not supplant, the schoolroom lesson'[67] This time, however, it was backed by an understanding of radio's real potential as an educational medium. Radio could enliven learning, Bronner went on to explain:
It should appeal to the imagination, develop initiative, foster and keep alive at all costs the child's natural desire to know about the world breaking in on his senses... In this country, as in the great democracies of the world, the broadcaster is coming to be recognised as the teacher's most potent ally, for it is in his gift to bring to the class-room influences - in the form, for example, of historical dramatizations - which can give flesh and blood to the school curriculum, vitalize it and make of it a thing of living human interest.[68]Under Bronner's leadership, the new Federal Department of School Broadcasts went beyond broadcast instruction to develop programs which incorporated the qualities of 'good radio'.
Notable among Bronner's initiatives in the late 1930s were:
In the pre-television era several attempts were made to supplement radio with a visual element. One of these was an electronic approach through which still pictures were broadcast to listeners through a 'Fultograph' - a fore-runner of the facsimile machine. Radio-Wien (Austria) began broadcasting pictures in this way in October 1928. Walter Smital described this development with considerable optimism in a talk on Radio-Wien early in 1929 as follows:
You know, of course, that since the 15th October last year Radio Wien has been broadcasting pictures in order, at least partly, to complete optically the ordinary broadcasts. The somewhat high price of the necessary apparatus, and the relative crudeness of the results achieved at first, were the reasons that not many people availed themselves of this service.Despite improvements in the reproductive capacity of this process, it did not win public acceptance. At the onset of the Depression the promise of a few pictures a day could hardly have offset the cost involved in acquiring the necessary equipment, especially when universal ownership of a radio was far from being achieved in even the most developed countries.[75]But since the middle of January of the present year the method of transmission has been improved to such a degree that now, for the first time, it is possible to transmit pictures of all kinds... any photographic negative whatever may be broadcast by radio as soon as it has been developed.[74]
In Australia there were experiments with 'facsimile' transmission by radio, and, in 1942, a Parliamentary Committee on Wireless Broadcasting described this development in quite positive terms in comparison with television. According to the Committee:
[television] brings to the listening set a transient or fleeting pictures, while facsimile produces on the listening set an 'exact copy' or 'facsimile sheet' of the words or the pictures broadcast from the studio. Television produces fleeting or 'motion' pictures; facsimile produces a 'lasting picture' and the 'printed word', which remain as a record on paper or other substance.[76]The Committee recommended that no development of this technology for broadcasting take place until it had been investigated by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Wireless Broadcasting, which the Government had proposed to set up. While the facsimile would become an important technology for point-to-point communication in the 1980s, it would never be developed as an adjunct to broadcast radio in Australia or elsewhere.
A far more practical approach to creating visual support for radio was the publication of printed material. The 1931 Victorian experiment in educational broadcasting was supported by a booklet published for each term's program of school and adult education broadcasts. These included biographical sketches and photographs of the program presenters, an outline of each series, and several photographs relating to the subject matter of some of the talks. The ABC continued the publication of booklets after it took over from the Australian Broadcasting Company and, in 1939, the number of booklets distributed was 443,850.[77]
With radio-film the ABC sought to take visual support for its school broadcasts beyond the occasional picture in a booklet. The initiative, described 'as foreshadowing television',[78] combined radio and the recently introduced film-strip projector and was first demonstrated in Victoria in May 1938. The topics chosen for the demonstration were 'The Life History of a Frog' and 'A Dragon Hunt in Modern Times', which described the 'life of the giant dragon lizards of the island of Komodo, in the Dutch East Indies'.[79] The broadcast lesson was conducted in the following manner:
A film-strip projector was placed in the studio and operated by the broadcaster. As he flashed the picture on to the screen he gave a cue to the listening schools, which had projectors and duplicate strips of the film in the class-rooms, and they in turn changed from picture to picture on his instructions.[80]Over seventy schools participated in the initial broadcasts - many of them in the country, 'some schools being as far as three hundred miles from Melbourne'.[81] The 'radio-film broadcasts' won immediate acceptance in Victoria and further programs were produced. By the end of 1939 audio-visual programs were being received by 120 Victorian schools from 3LO, Melbourne, and by an additional 150 schools around Australia on relay.[82]
Radio-film was seen as an ideal vehicle for providing lessons by 'expert specialist teachers', particularly for small country schools.[83] It would not replace the established approach to educational broadcasting, but it would continue to be used into the 1970s.[84] Radio-film was adopted by the BBC in the early 1960s and, by the early 1970s, was being used regularly by European broadcasting organisations.
In the late 1930s, the ABC demonstrated that it was capable of producing innovative and effective educational programs, but these programs produced by the Federal Department of School Broadcasts constituted only a small proportion of its educational output at this time. The bulk of its educational programs, which were produced in the states, continued to be delivered in the form of lectures by teachers and academics, untrained in broadcasting techniques. Thus, the ABC continued into the 1940s generally ignoring its own requirement that enlightenment must come through entertainment, so far as educational broadcasting was concerned, and failing, therefore, to demonstrate adequately the value of radio as an educational medium. Australia's national broadcaster was yet to demonstrate a real commitment to an educational role.
It also remains to be seen how Australian educators will approach the digital revolution. The early years of radio saw little interest in educational broadcasting from Australian educators. In fact, there was significant opposition to the use of radio in education from educational quarters. When educators did take an active role, they failed to exploit the strengths of the medium. There are, perhaps, some lessons here that apply to this end of the twentieth century. The Internet's multimedia and interactive capacities are generally under-exploited in Australian education, and educators are yet to stake a claim on the new broadcasting technologies. Perhaps, what is required is something of the boldness of the Victorian pioneers and the vision of Bronner.
The significance of the 1931 Victorian experiment in educational broadcasting should not be overlooked. While those who conducted it are certainly open to criticism for lack of research into overseas developments, it revealed a bold, progressive approach to educational innovation. In 1931, educational broadcasting was still 'in the stage of experiment and inquiry' in Australia; an attempt to introduce it in two states had just failed. Nevertheless, the national broadcasting organisation and a highly credentialled committee of educators proceeded to introduce it throughout the State of Victoria. In so doing they made three important assumptions regarding innovation in education. First, innovation was desirable; secondly, it could be achieved through a process of experimentation which included teachers as participants; thirdly, it was not necessary to wait for the final, proven product before incorporating an innovative element into educational practice. The resultant model represents the foundation of technological innovation in Australian education.
| Author: Tony Lapsley, School of Asian Studies, The University of Western Australia
Please cite as: Lapsley, A. (1998). The origins of educational broadcasting in Australia. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 14(1), 1-24. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet14/lapsley.html |