Chapter 8: The Promise and Failure of Educational Television in a Statewide System: Delaware, 1964-1971

For most of the twentieth century, innovators promoted the use of technology to improve learning in our schools. As Larry Cuban noted in Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986), there has been no end to promises of how motion pictures, radio, and television would transform the learning process. In each case, some educators utilized the technology with enthusiasm. However, in every case, most educators resisted such innovation until it seemed to fade away. Such was true of the statewide instructional television system in Delaware, for which all the public schools became interconnected in 1965, only to have the system dismantled in 1971.