Satellite Technology, Televised Classrooms, and the Education of Marginalized Students in 1960s Colombia

In 1962, Colombia's government launched one of the world’s first tele-education projects, providing a model for other countries that mobilized satellite technology to bridge the rural-urban divide. The United States Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps provided material and technical support and claimed that Colombia’s program reached nearly half a million students in and around Bogotá. This paper seeks to understand both the vision of this project and how it operated in practice. It asks the following questions: How did tele-education shape students' and teachers' relationships with technology and ideas about communication? How did tele-education intersect with broader political projects? The paper concludes with a comparative discussion of tele-education in Mexico in 1968 and 1969.