“Signals to Every Dip and Hollow”: The Rise and Fall of the Appalachian Education Satellite Program and the Appalachian Community Service Network

In the era of Internet mass communication, the steady growth of distance education seems an inevitable consequence. Though the classic setting of physical classrooms, school buildings, and campuses cannot seriously be seen as threatened, distance courses are a permanent institution due to high-tech media. Reactions to distance education courses range from mild unease to more outright rejections. One study from a scholar in educational policy at the University of Wisconsin found that while the Internet has in some sense negated the issue of distance from students and campuses, the issue of “place” still has a significant bearing (for higher education at least) on where students apply and attend. The author dubs these areas “education deserts”—communities bereft of higher-education institutions or those that place a disproportionate burden on one or two community colleges. Roughly 10 percent of adults in America live in these areas, the study finds, and the availability of distance learning technology has not made any significant improvement in applications or enrollment among adults in these communities. A report on the article in The Atlantic observed that “the conversation about how to make college more accessible is not new,” yet issues like education deserts “have been largely ignored.”¹

An early forerunner to distance education in the Appalachian region was the cable television network, The Learning Channel (TLC). Now a largely irrelevant purveyor of reality TV shows, TLC in its earlier years produced educational programming as an alternative to its more entertainment-centric competitors. That TLC was once known in another life as the Appalachian Community Service Network (ACSN) is not a heretofore-unknown revelation—it’s circulated as merely an interesting bit of trivia about the present-day network, usually as an emblem of the irony in commercial networks purporting to present edifying and useful content to mass audiences. A closer look into the story of the ACSN and its predecessor, the Appalachian Educational Satellite Project (AESP), finds the nation was not always so cynical about television media. Indeed, contemporary conversations about educational television better resemble our present-day research into distance education technology and curricula than our complaints about TV shows.

In the first few decades of the television era, the new medium carried a noteworthy and profound cultural optimism that has since waned, similar today to the way the Internet has been regarded in recent decades. A television set was regarded foremost as a means of entertainment, but was also genuinely considered a device with actual educational benefits, both for children and the general population. The years prior to the Appalachian experiments in satellite and cable telecommunications saw a fair share of cynicism about the public benefits of television, even in regard to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the late sixties. The goal of the men and women conducting the later television experiments in Appalachia, as well as their primary benefactors, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), was to explore new and advanced uses for the medium. To them, television could be used not only to connect a disadvantaged region to the rest of the world, but could also form a new, technologically-sophisticated institution in the region’s education system.

Within the general scholarship in Appalachian studies, education garners a great deal of attention, distinguishing the topic as one of the most robust and refined areas of the discipline overall. Though all scholars of Appalachia owe a debt to Henry Shapiro and David Whisnant for Appalachia on Our Mind (1978) and All That is Native and Fine (1983) respectively, the intellectual challenges posed by those two works have been answered with distinction by a number of education historians.² Thanks to the works of Deborah Blackwell, Jess Stoddart, Karen Tice, and Melanie Beals Goan (to name a few) we can examine with more magnanimity the characters and motives of a wide variety of educators working in the region and no longer feel compelled to look with a fine-tooth comb for traces...