In our podcast, media historian Maximilian Brockhaus talks about the now historic media format of school radio and school television in Austria.
Broadcasters soon realized that the new media technology of radio could also be used for educational purposes. Just a few years after the start of broadcasting in Austria in 1924, the Austrian Radio-Verkehrs-AG (RAVAG) tested so-called agricultural school radio. It was aimed specifically at students at agricultural schools and offered broadcasts on the "utilization of potatoes in agriculture" or reports on "farming in Denmark". A test run for actual school radio, which started in schools throughout Austria in 1932.
Revive and Enrich
"The idea was to offer students something that the usual means of presentation in the classroom could not provide," says Maximilian Brockhaus, who is pursuing a doctorate on this topic at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and was a visiting researcher at the HBI from October 2023 to January 2024. "The radio was intended to revive and enrich lessons. The new technology was particularly useful in music lessons or foreign language classes, where students could suddenly listen to native speakers on the radio."
Information about the school radio programme was regularly published in the program magazine "Radio Vienna" so that teachers could organize their lessons around it. If a program was on that the students were supposed to listen to, everyone gathered around a radio set, either in their own classroom or in a room set up especially for this purpose and listened to the program.
Skepticism towards New Technology
Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic about the new technology. In a letter to the editor of the program magazine, Maximilian Brockhaus read that one teacher was outraged by the "disruptive nature of school radio", which would disturb the "intimate and spiritual relationship" between the class and the teacher.
A critical attitude towards new media technology runs through media history and can also be observed today. "We are currently experiencing similar skepticism when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom," says Maximilian Brockhaus.
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Maximilian Brockhaus
Johanna Sebauer
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(Hamburg, 27 March 2024)
