Citizenship and the Finnish School Radio of the 1930s

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]