International Education and the Advent of Distance Learning Technology in the Postwar Period

Margaret Mih Tillman, Purdue University

Abstract

After World War II, UNESCO aimed to promote “international education” across borders to inculcate a new sense of global, rather than national, citizenship. For example, in place of textbooks emphasizing war and nation-building, UNESCO encouraged new historical narratives emphasizing global issues such as medical outbreaks and scientific discoveries. UNESCO also encouraged UN-member states to adopt this new curriculum, along with teaching children about the history of the UN and global initiatives. Furthermore, UNESCO also employed new technologies and systems of communication in order to make knowledge accessible across borders; in China, UNESCO sponsored a project exploring “visual literacy” in connection to wordless informational videos about hygiene and disease prevention. These videos were meant to serve as blueprints for widespread dissemination. Such messaging was not only top-down, however, as UNESCO also facilitated the connection of pen pals around the world. The institution also encouraged young people, educated in its new curriculum, to explain their own ideals for a new vision of the future. In sum, UNESCO celebrated the contribution of science and technology in facilitating cross-cultural and transnational relationships.

Before the outbreak of Covid-19, most long-distance learning programs for school-age children (in contrast to continuing education for adult learners) were focused on expanding the horizons of young people by placing them in contact with their counterparts elsewhere; such programs generally took as their basic unit a particular classroom, followed by individual interactions within that unit. With Covid-19, such programs have been reconfigured to allow individual school children to access their own unique classrooms. These restrictions and parameters have meant that schools have not generally been able to draw upon preexisting programs as models, and they take as their horizon of interaction the local classroom. Given other pressures to localize production, etc., this trend in schooling perhaps manifests a further symptom of the universal turn inward.