Citizenship and the Finnish School Radio of the 1930s

Dr Heidi Kurvinen is a historian who has specialised in media and gender history and is based in University of Turku, Finland. In her current project, she is studying children’s involvement in social movements in Finland 1959–1989. Additionally, she participates in the research project on the 100-year celebration of the Finnish Broadcasting Company with her entry on children’s programmes. Connected to these projects she visited the Centre for the History of Childhood in Trinity term 2024.

“I loved the lessons when we listened to the school radio. For example, they aired programs on historical places. Even today, I like to listen to documentaries.”

My mother told this short reminiscence when I recently asked about her experiences of school radio aired by the Finnish Broadcasting Company. She grew up in a small, rural area in the Northern part of Finland in the 1950s and the quote eloquently captures the importance of school radio in the media landscape of that time. In contrast, I have only vague recollections of school broadcasts from my first school years at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. At that point, school broadcasting had already lost its momentum as a central arena for children’s citizenship education, but in its early days the educational ethos definitely formed the core of the school radio in Finland, as I will show in this text.

The Finnish Broadcasting Company was established in 1926 and the first school radio programmes were aired in the autumn of 1934.[1] One of their explicit aims was to reduce inequalities between urban and rural areas by allowing even “students from peripheral schools to come into contact with leading cultural personalities”.[2] Simultaneously, the school radio was viewed as an incremental tool in strengthening the pupils’ enthusiasm for learning and schoolwork. This was not atypical. As Fleming and Toutant have formulated it, school radio of the 1920s and 1930s was viewed as “‘a modern box of magic,’ an appliance that could make school lessons come to life in a way they never had before”.[3]

School radio was an inherently transnational format that had been developed already in the 1920s in the UK, Sweden and Canada, to mention just a few examples. Probably, due to the application of an already tested format, school broadcasting was an immediate success in Finland. During the first year of operation, school radio was listened to in over 2,564 public schools, and the total number of listeners during the year was more than 142,000. This was a considerable group of listeners in a country in which the population was only a little over 3.5 million and the number of radio listening fees was around 120,000.[4] The School broadcasts were also perhaps the format that most clearly followed the educational ethos of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, an idea that the Finns had adopted from the British BBC.[5]

The school broadcasts were not only listened to at school, but pupils were encouraged to explore the leaflet on school radio programmes on their own. This multimedial experience can be interpreted as having formed a learning space that blurred the boundaries of formal, non-formal and informal education.[6] In fact, the basic premises of the early Finnish school radio resonated with the then prevailing pedagogical thinking in which students were understood to construct their societal identity through work. Relying on John Dewey’s educational ideology, the hands-on work and experimenting that the pupils were doing was viewed as incremental part of learning in Finnish public schools: students were viewed to learn by doing.[7]

One might even claim that the teachers’ instructions concerning the use of school radio resonate with the principles of Flipped Classroom, which are of use in present-day learning environments.[8] Pupils of the 1930s were expected to familiarise themselves with the topics of the programmes in advance. In addition, notes were to be taken while listening to the programmes, after which comprehension would be tested by discussing them together. The programme leaflets reminded the pupils of this by repeating that they should “always carry a pencil and paper” with them “during school radio lessons for taking notes and drawing”. The listening experience itself was inherently intermedial, as the broadcasts might refer to observational images in the programme booklet, as teachers were instructed in the fall of 1935.[9]

The independent work of pupils was thought to deepen their understanding of the new information conveyed by the school radio. By participating in the meaning-making process of their learning, schoolchildren were allowed an active input in their schooling, a trait that resonates with definitions of children’s active citizenship.[10] It was fostered by initiating various forms of interaction with the listeners of the school broadcasts. Peers were thought to be particularly important motivational examples for others’ schoolwork and they also produced an experience of imagined citizenship, to loosely follow Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept of imagined communities[11]: the pupils became aware that their experience of schoolwork was shared in thousands of public schools across the country, as the Director General of the national Board of Education A. J. Tarjanne formulated it in the fall of 1936.[12] This imagined citizenship was reinforced by illustrations that showed pupils from different parts of the country in the programme leaflet. These images strengthened an experience of an intimate community among the young listeners, to loosely follow Griffen-Foley’s argumentation.[13]

The radio also gave schoolchildren the opportunity to imagine other countries and peoples to which their own Finnishness was related. School radio increased the children’s opportunities to reach out beyond Finland’s borders, at least in their imagination. These mediated experiences became important builders of a new kind of a worldview in a country that was gradually turning into a modern society. In fact, the school radio was an incremental tool in educating pupils and their teachers to become cultivated users of the modern media technology. However, there was a hierarchical relationship between the schoolchildren and their teachers. As Barclay has formulated it, “the broadcasts had to appeal to schoolchildren, but more importantly they needed the approval of the teachers who controlled their use.”[14]

Students listen to the school radio at the Västerby Elementary School in 1951: Bror Brandt, Press Photo Archive, JOKA, JOKAVN4A1B45:1. CC BY 4.0.