Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Anarchism --- Radicalism

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Relatively little has been researched on the history of traffic education. Even within educational sciences it is an underdeveloped area with much potential for growth, especially tanking to account the large practical implications a better understanding of it could have in our daily lives. Traffic education deserves more attention though since millions of people either perish or are injured in traffic accidents globally, making it one of the main causes of death. In low- and middle-income countries the situation is dire as they concentrate a disproportionate amount of traffic accidents. Motivated by the formerly described, this master thesis intends to gain more understanding of traffic education from a historical perspective by conducting a general literature review and an exploration of traffic education in Colombia. It was found that research on the history of traffic education has been usually conducted within larger studies on the history of motorization, urban development or childhood. There is some information available for some countries, most of them Western, focusing on the first half of the 20th century but there is little cohesion among researchers as they come from diverse backgrounds and have equally diverse interests. Regarding Colombia, no information was found on the history of traffic education but enough primary sources were gathered to gain an initial understanding of it that could suggest future research paths. This study used television records stored by Señal Memoria, the largest audiovisual archive in the country, and broadcasted between 1982 and 2010. In general, sources presented a diverse traffic education landscape involving several agents, themes and genres. Traffic was understood by the institutions commissioning or producing the videos as an structured system that required compliance with rules to be safe and efficient. These institutions made ignorance of and lack of compliance with traffic rules responsible for traffic accidents and promoted the population’s knowledge of them through television accordingly. Traffic education television programs did not occur in isolation but were sometimes related to similar initiatives taking place in schools and on the streets.