This paper examines several correspondence schools that developed courses in advertising for young men and women who were interested in learning about the subject but who were not necessarily interested in attending a college or university. In addition, the paper discusses the founding of the National Home Study Council, which developed standards…

In 1919, the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) established the Elementary Correspondence (EC) School to provide formal education for children living in rural areas with difficult access to a school. Through children's letters, this paper interrogates the concept of place, a key one for placed-based approaches to environmental education.…

The State of Alaska, by some measures the United States' most rural state, has long supported correspondence schools, a popular school choice option available to all students statewide and used primarily by homeschooled students. This paper first explores Alaska correspondence schools in historical context, and then quantifies capture rate,…

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), previously named the Veterans Administration, has been providing veterans educational assistance benefits, including GI Bill benefits, since 1944. The benefits have been intended, at various times, to compensate for compulsory service, encourage voluntary service, prevent unemployment, provide…

The purpose of this study was to examine correspondence schools of music in the early twentieth century. Advertisements in widely circulated household and music periodicals and archival copies of courses from Siegel-Myers Correspondence School of Music, United States School of Music, American College of Music, and others were examined. Research…

Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government--supported "schooling by mail" arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second…

Anna Eliot Ticknor (1823-1896) founded the first correspondence school in the United States, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. In the fall of 1873 an educational movement was quietly initiated from her home in Boston, Massachusetts. A politically and socially sophisticated leader, she recognized the need that women felt for continuing…

Tracing the correspondence composition courses taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1912 to 1924, this essay argues that examining distance education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can reveal possible problems or solutions to issues composition instructors face in twenty-first-century debates about moving…

A few years ago, the author saw a video of a pop concert. It looked just like concerts of his youth: a well-lit stage amid a darkened crowd flecked with small wavering lights. He laughed when he realized, however, that the swaying glow was coming not from cigarette lighters but from LCD screens. This juxtaposition of old flames and new beacons…

Background: Correspondence schools abounded in early 20th-century America. Several hundred for-profit vendors drew the vast majority of the annual enrollments, which peaked at one half million in the mid-1920s. Dozens of well-known universities created home study departments to expand their "extension" work. The handful of good studies…

In this paper, I examine the provenance of distance education or "teledidactics" in Australia. I take as my case studies the New South Wales Correspondence School and the School of the Air and suggest that their emergence was underpinned by a desire on the part of educational and broadcasting bureaucrats to increase the equity of school…

In large continental landmasses such as Australia, forms of education, including correspondence schooling, emerged in the early twentieth century that allowed children in remote regions to access education. To make such schooling possible, other "technologies" of state provision were mobilised such as the postal system, rail network, and…

As enrollments in correspondence schools soared in the early twentieth century, unethical practices marred the reputation of this type of learning. Prominent schools created the National Home Study Council in 1926 to combat the proliferation of sham schools. At the same time, council members knew that the better schools also needed to change their…

The first round of attempts to extend the access of working people to higher education began in 1873 with an imitation of the University of London on the prairies of Illinois. For all practical purposes, it ended in the legislature of the State of New York in 1892, although it took more than a decade to formally close all of the external degree…

Each school, district, or state has a unique set of circumstances and obstacles to deal with in implementing a one-to-one laptop program. That is especially true of Denali Borough School District in Alaska. Located in the Alaskan interior, it encompasses Denali National Park (with North America's tallest mountain), covers more than 12,000 square…