From Harvard via Moscow to West Berlin: educational technology, programmed instruction and the commercialisation of learning after 1957

After the Sputnik shock of 1957, the United States initiated education reform, based in part on the hope that technology could facilitate efficient school learning. This development was largely driven by the confrontation between the eastern and western Blocs: on both sides of the Iron Curtain, reformists promoted educational technology for the purpose of better instruction so as to improve the performance capacity of their own societies. The first section of the article focuses on this circulation of knowledge, after which the second section, drawing on the example of Germany, argues that, due to the constellation of interests in the 1960s, substantial organisational and financial resources could be mobilised to promote educational technology. However, when support from political and pedagogical circles dwindled in the 1970s, it became detached from its previous objectives, but was pragmatically advanced in the private sector