The introduction of school radio in the early 20th century represents a pivotal moment in the reconfiguration of educational forms and infrastructures (Annegarn-Gläß, 2016; Lefebvre, 2013). Far beyond a simple pedagogical supplement, radio opened possibilities for distance learning in geographically isolated regions (Ceschi, 1995). Our study examines how school radio contributed to reshaping the school form. It askes, whether school radio enabled another timing in the dissemination or circulation of educational topics and which actors were given the opportunity to define the relevance of school subjects as a result.

Emerging, for the Swiss case, in the 1930s, school radio aimed not only to support classroom instruction but also to construct a space that could foster a new sense of civic community. This is accompanied by both unifying and disruptive tendencies. Radio’s capacity to reach pupils simultaneously across regions endowed it with a unifying, nation-building potential. At the same time, fears of central control over teaching content in a federal system grew. School radio indeed disrupted established temporalities of educational practices. Unlike textbooks or official programs, radio lessons could react rapidly to current events, thereby integrating contemporary social issues into school activities and encouraging pedagogical innovation (Solcà, 2015). At the same time, however, it disrupted curriculum planning and lesson design.

This paper analyses how school radio contributed to transforming educational governance and infrastructures (1930-1970). By doing so, the study interrogates the establishment of new educational media may, in specific historical contexts, redefine the spatial and temporal boundaries of schooling. To investigate these questions, the research adopts a transregional perspective for the analysis of school radio’s impact on the school form (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2018). This study will focus on the (multilingual) Swiss case and will examines pedagogical and specialized press, as well as the content of radio lessons themselves. The results are examined in the context of international developments and the question of how international actors positioned themselves within broader debates on the pedagogical potential of this new medium. This analysis and contextualization allow insights into the question, how producers of educational broadcasts (radio professionals, teachers and pedagogical authorities) selectively engaged with contemporary topics with emerging social concerns.

To answer our question, this paper analyzes a diverse corpus of published and unpublished sources, including activity reports, radio bulletins, broadcast programs, educational broadcasts, teacher’s magazines, school curricula, and textbooks within the different language regions in Switzerland. The analysis will be complemented by an outlook to international developments, considering published and unpublished sources such as international reports on school radio. This enables us to relate our comparative analysis of school radio within multilingual Switzerland.

The objective of this contribution is thus to understand how school radio, as an educational innovation (Tricot, 2017), reconfigured the school form and enabled new forms of civic and social learning. More broadly, the case offers insights into how media technologies can act as catalysts for institutional transformation and pedagogical renewal in contexts marked by a rapid societal change.

In the 1950s, during the period of heightened Cold War tensions, global geopolitical rivalry was rising and the comparison of national school systems became a strategic political instrument. This development reinforced a sense of competition among nation states to enhance their education systems for various purposes, including military and economic objectives. Across political, educational, and economic domains, a ubiquitous imperative emerged to remain fit for the future. The race to prepare the next generation for a technologically advanced world intensified further during the 1950s, as the stark differences in technological sophistication between nations (i.e. the West versus the East) became more apparent. At the same time, confidence grew that technological progress could “fix” or at least substantially improve pedagogical practice. Within this climate of perceived urgency, Switzerland saw the creation of numerous cantonal commissions which, among things, examined the quality of emerging technologies (e.g. hard- and software, usability, cost-effectiveness) and organised technical and pedagogical/didactic trainings for teachers.

In our contribution, we examine how in the boom decades this “double crisis” – a supposedly outdated, insufficient or ‚broken‘ educational praxis and the pervasive fear of falling behind – manifested on both the supply and demand sides of the Swiss EdTech market. We also examine how subsequent economic crises – such as those of the 1970s following the oil price shock – are reflected both in the EdTech industry’s offerings and in patterns of expenditure. On the one hand, we examine how EdTech marketers strategically mobilized the different crises in their promotional materials, advertisements, and brochures. On the other hand, drawing on school budgets at the cantonal and municipal levels, we investigate the extent to which school authorities responded to this context by increasing or decreasing the purchases. We demonstrate that some form of educational crisis was always present, and that investments in educational technologies consistently emerged as the proposed solution.

This contribution analyses the funding practices of the “Stiftung für Stipendien und Hilfen an Frauen” between 1960 and 1980 against the backdrop of societal changes largely ignored by the institutional structures of the Swiss education system. During the “education expansion” of the 1960s, Article 27 on scholarships and educational assistance was incorporated into the Federal Constitution in 1963 (Criblez 2001, 2016). While the primary aim was to tap educational reserves and secure a qualified next generation, educational policy concerns such as equal opportunities were also discussed to facilitate access to educational institutions for socially and economically disadvantaged groups (Scheuber 1997). Although the reorganisation of scholarship provision was intended to open access to (higher) education to broader segments of the population, women often fell through the cracks. Scholarships from cantonal scholarship offices and private funds were often not accessible to female applicants over the age of 20 (AGoF 194:4:8 Annual Report 1970). To close this gap, the “Stiftung für Stipendien und Hilfen an Frauen” was founded in 1960, financed from part of the net profit of the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in 1958. The foundation focused on enabling women to obtain vocational training or to re-enter the labour market, especially widowed or divorced women, and young women who, due to care responsibilities, had no vocational training or had renounced their own education in favour of their siblings (Schucan-Grob 1976). In 1965, 26 women received scholarships, amounting in total to around 52,000 francs (AGoF 194:4:8 Annual Report 1965).

The decisions of the scholarship commission provide insights into the criteria according to which women were accepted or rejected, the norms that implicitly shaped ideas of who was considered “eligible for funding” (age, labour market prospects, marital status), and the extent to which social problem constellations (divorce, care work, labour shortages) were recognised. The following questions are central: Who was considered eligible for scholarships? What educational and occupational trajectories were scholarships intended to enable? Which women were (not) supported, and why? How did the expectations of scholarship holders and the images of working and studying women change over time? To what extent were concepts such as “social mobility”, equal opportunities, or “éducation permanente” negotiated?

Drawing on archival research in the holdings of the foundation (minutes, correspondence, files, and annual reports) and inspired by recent contributions in historical institutionalism (Emmenegger 2021) and agency theory (Emirbayer/Mische 1998; Raithelhuber 2008; Thomas 2016), this contribution shows that women possessed individual strategies for action and used the foundation as a resource for reorientation, retraining, or labour market integration. However, they did not appear as a collective actor capable of demanding institutional adaptations.

The foundation is not understood as a driver of institutional transformation, but as a response to social changes that were only partially addressed by state actors, such as changing family structures and equality discourses. It acted in a compensatory manner rather than as a political reform actor: it reacted to social change, opened individual scopes of action for women, and highlighted the limits of the existing institutional framework of the education system. Through its compensatory engagement, it tended to stabilise existing structures rather than shifting them. Although women developed individual agency, the analysis shows that the foundation, by compensating institutional gaps, did not challenge scholarship regulations or structural reforms at the political level. The foundation’s funding practices reveal which areas of the education system remained unchanged in the face of new social problems and which gaps were filled by private initiatives, offering insights into the interplay between social change, perception of crisis, and the limited adaptability of institutional frameworks in the education sector.

This paper explores how education has been mobilized as a central instrument of gov-ernance and as a moral–imaginative resource in times of systemic crisis. It argues that the historical relationship between education and future-making reveals both the pos-sibilities and the limits of using schooling to respond to transversal societal challenges - economic instability, inequality, ecological disruption, and technological acceleration. By situating these dynamics within a long genealogy of international education gov-ernance, the paper aligns with the SGBF 2026 theme “Bildung für eine lebenswerte Zukunft” by examining how the promise of education as a means of creating a liveable future has been continuously redefined in response to crisis.

The analysis conceptualizes education governance through the lens of governing complexes: historically evolving, crisis-responsive constellations of knowledge forms, technologies, institutions, and actors that link local, national, and supranational levels. These complexes function as “living architectures” that stabilize - and periodically re-calibrate - the epistemic and political foundations of education. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the concept of critical junctures, the paper traces how successive crises have generated new configurations of legitimacy and authority in education.

Four historical junctures illustrate this long trajectory.

(1) The scientification of schooling in the interwar years transformed pedagogy into an empirical science and established expert institutions linking psychology, testing, and educational reform.

(2) The scientification of education at the global level in the 1950s–1960s marked the emergence of a planning paradigm in which UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank sought to align education with economic growth and modernization.

(3) The neoliberal turn of the 1980s–1990s, following fiscal and geopolitical crises, re-placed planning with accountability, competition, and privatization; education became a technocratic subsystem governed by indicators and performance metrics.

(4) Finally, the metrological regime of the 2000s–2010s extended quantification into all dimensions of governance. In the aftermath of financial and legitimacy crises, interna-tional organizations reasserted influence through soft governance and affective vocab-ularies - resilience, well-being, and social-emotional learning - while deepening their reliance on digital infrastructures and global data systems.

Across these periods, crises have served as engines of transformation rather than mere interruptions. As shown in recent research, international organizations have repeatedly used crises to reinvent themselves, renew legitimacy, and extend their reach. Educa-tion has thus functioned simultaneously as a response to and a technology of crisis - promising to produce adaptable, future-ready citizens while reproducing underlying logics of growth and measurement.

The current condition of global polycrisis - marked by ecological breakdown, techno-logical disruption, and geopolitical fragmentation - amplifies these historical patterns. The paper argues that contemporary discourses of learning crisis and human capital continue to transform uncertainty into governable metrics, positioning education as a managerial solution rather than a site for democratic deliberation. Yet, by revisiting the historical sedimentation of governing complexes, we can discern alternative trajecto-ries: moments when education served not as a technocratic fix but as a cultural and ethical project for shaping collective futures.

In dialogue with the SGBF 2026 call, this paper offers a historically grounded perspec-tive on how the promise of “education for a liveable future” has been mobilized through successive crises. It calls for rethinking education’s role beyond resilience and adaptation toward responsibility, imagination, and care. The concluding reflection con-siders whether, after 2030, education can once again be reclaimed as a space for reimagining international cooperation, sustainability, and solidarity in the face of global uncertainty.