Colombia - Nonformal Education

During the early twentieth century, small towns and cities had local newspapers that produced issues of less than 10 pages to a small circle of readers. Not until the 1930s did a major newspaper achieve national circulation. In 1929, Elías Pellet Buitrago made the first radio broadcast in Colombia. However, there were only about 250 receivers in the country. By 1935, radio's popularity grew. Although news programs of that time consisted of nothing more than commentators reading stories from journals, politicians recognized radio's potential as a campaign tool and sought to use it to mobilize crowds of voters. As a result, in 1941 there were 70 stations in Colombia, most of which played a various forms of music. Occasionally, literature and theater found their ways on to the airways. In the 1950s, transistor radios became popular and appeared everywhere (Williams and Guerrieri).

To some extent, radio offered a means to help rural education. In 1947, Father José Joaquin Solcedo initiated a church-sponsored program namedAcción Cultural Popular (ACPO), or Popular Culture Action. The idea was to use a radio relay system to transmit classes in reading and writing to all parts of the country. The classes concentrated on basic literacy but included such items as agricultural extension programs and sanitation suggestions. ACPO offered paperback texts at a nominal cost that the parish priest could distribute. Usually, an assistant helped the students follow the instructions. Financed entirely by the church, ACPO claimed to have 16,000 radio schools in the rural areas of Colombia in 1970. Despite these claims, some researchers found that many priests did not invest the necessary time in the program and that the broadcasts rarely reached the more remote areas of the country (Havens and Flinn).

In 1954, television came to Colombia, where it was initially controlled by the state bureau of information and news (Oficina de Información y Prensa del Estado). In 1955, the authority passed to the national office of television (Televisora Nacional). Not long after that, the state monopoly passed to the Instituto Nacional de Radion y Televisíon (National Institute of Radio and Television), also known as Inravisíon. As a result of such governmental control, politicians used the television to campaign, and they cancelled programs that were critical of their policies. Nonetheless, television spread rapidly, covering 80 percent of the territory by 1960 and reaching almost two million viewers. Although most of the programming consisted of soap operas and sporting events, in 1961, television channels began carrying educational programs for children and agricultural information for farmers in rural areas. By 1970, there were two national television channels dedicated to educational programming (Williams and Guerrieri).

In 1972, more than 12,000,000 radios were in use in Colombia. In the 1970s, the number of member radio stations held by the major networks increased. However, the three principal networks—CARACOL, RCN, and TODELAR—established ties with television and print media. Similarly, newspapers consolidated. In the late 1970s, there were 42 papers in 16 Colombian cities. Each had circulations of approximately 200,000 readers. Finally, in 1985, the national television network, Inravisíon, broke into three branches, and channels appeared in the different regions of Colombia (Williams and Guerrieri).