'Sesame Street' still educating kids after four influential decades
This story has been brought to you by the letter S and the numbers 15 and 40.
The S, as anyone who has ever watched television can deduce by now, stands for "Sesame Street." The 40 is almost as easy: This year marks the 40th anniversary of sunny days, friendly neighbors and the fuzzy creatures who live on that street where the air is sweet. If you haven't watched recently, you'll be relieved to know that impending middle age hasn't wrinkled "Sesame Street" all that much. Big Bird still waddles, Cookie Monster still goes on his sugar binges and Ernie still wakes up Bert at all hours with questions (none of them, mercifully, about the nature of their relationship). In the world of television, the endurance of "Sesame Street" is nothing short of a miracle.
Which brings us to that second number of the day: 15. That, shockingly, is where Nielsen says "Sesame Street" ranks among the top children's shows on the air. Some months, it does even worse. Ask a preschooler who her favorite TV character is, and chances are she'll say Dora, Curious George or, heaven help us, SpongeBob. We know it doesn't seem nice to point out that the granddaddy of children's television is regularly beaten up by a girl who talks to her backpack, but these are desperate times.
The Children's Television Workshop (now called Sesame Workshop) produces only 26 episodes a year now, down from a high of 130. The workshop itself recently announced it was laying off 20 percent of its staff as the recession continues to take a toll on nonprofit arts organizations. But "Sesame Street" is no ordinary nonprofit. It is, arguably, the most important children's program in the history of television. No show has affected the way we think about education, parenting, childhood development and cultural diversity more than Big Bird and friends.
As recounted in "Street Gang," a new book by TV journalist Michael Davis, the show came about after Lloyd Morrisett, an experimental psychologist, walked into his living room and found his 3-year-old daughter mesmerized by the TV test pattern. He told that story at a dinner party and wondered aloud if children might be able to learn something from the boob tube. It seems like a crazy question in our "Baby Einstein" world, but back then, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we didn't know what we didn't know.
"Educators were virtually ignoring the intellect of preschool children," says Joan Ganz Cooney, who threw that dinner party and has been the show's visionary since the beginning. Children would eat up the ABCs before kindergarten, Cooney believed, especially if a wacky puppet ate up alphabet-shaped cookies along with them.
The Department of Education was skeptical. "Captain Kangaroo" and "Mister Rogers" had not become must-see TV; "Bozo" and "Romper Room" presented dumbed-down fun. But the government agreed to contribute half of the original $8 million budget to launch "Sesame Street." "It was a speculative leap," Morrisett says.
The results were pretty immediate. The first season in 1969 set out to teach children to count from one to 10, but it became clear that kids as young as 2 could make it to 20. (The show now hits 100, counting by 10s.) That rookie year also yielded three Emmys, a Peabody Award, a front-page rave from The New York Times and one especially noteworthy piece of fan mail: from Richard Nixon.
The most impressive feedback, however, came from the kids themselves - or at least from their test scores. No show to this day has probed its effects on kids as thoroughly as "Sesame Street," which plans to spend more than $770,000 in 2009 on its department of education and research. When people think of "Sesame Street" as the essence of educational television, what they don't realize is how much the show has educated the educators.
"Before Sesame Street, kindergartens taught very little," says Cooney, "and suddenly masses of children were coming in knowing letters and numbers." Independent research found that children who regularly watch "Sesame Street" gained more than nonviewers on tests of letter and number recognition, vocabulary and early math skills. One study, in 2001, revealed that the show's positive effects on reading and achievement lasted through high school. "It totally changed parental thinking about television," says Daniel Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts.
But the show was never just about test scores. Perhaps the most radical part of the Sesame DNA has always been its social activism. From the start, Sesame targeted lower-income, urban kids. The show arrived on the heels of riots in Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Chester Pierce, a Harvard professor who founded the Black Psychiatrists of America.
"It was intentional from the beginning to show different races living together," says David Kleeman, executive director of the American Center for Children and Media.
In 1969, that was still a radical notion in some corners of the country. Here was a TV show putting African-Americans on a level playing field with white characters. (Though it should be noted that when the show premiered, some African-Americans took offense to Oscar the Grouch, who accepts his poverty rather than fighting against it, as a demeaning stand-in for inner-city blacks.) An integrated program aimed at children was too much for the good people of Mississippi. The state's commission for educational television banned the show in May 1970. Cooney called it "a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi," and news reports saw her outrage and raised it. The state reversed itself 22 days later.
The show's impact has been as profound overseas. "Sesame Street" is now exported to 16 countries and regions - places such as the Palestinian territories, Kosovo and Bangladesh.
The tough topics aren't only political. Following the attacks of 9/11, the 33rd-season premiere found Elmo struggling to deal with his fear after he sees a grease fire break out at a lunch counter. In 1982, Will Lee, the man who played Mr. Hooper, died suddenly of a heart attack. The show decided to tackle the issue of death with an episode on Big Bird's distress and confusion over losing his friend.
Not everyone thinks that "Sesame Street" is doing right by kids. Latino groups have criticized it for not having a Hispanic character in its early years. The show only introduced a major female Muppet in 1992. It has also been criticized by Ralph Nader and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood for selling out its characters in too many licensing deals.
There is no question that Sesame has provoked some critics to chastise it for getting a little too attached to the letters P and C. After the show launched an obesity-awareness campaign, one particular Muppet needed to get with the program. So in 2005, Cookie Monster began to sing about cookies being "sometimes" food. Parents, some of whom wrongly believed that Cookie was going to become a health-food nut, started a preschool food fight. It turns out that Cookie still eats cookies in his typically frenzied fashion. "But the lesson was, this show is important," says executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente. "Don't mess with it."
That's impossible, of course. As Nicole Kidman might say about Botox, no 40-year-old looks young without a few touch-ups. Sesame Workshop recently launched a new Web site featuring a huge library of free video clips, both recent ones and classics. It also offers a series of podcasts that parents can download to their phones to show their kids later, like when they're stuck in a long line at the grocery store. "We need to continuously reinvent or experiment," says CEO Gary Knell, "or else we are going to be dead."
Could that really happen? Maybe it's wrong to even worry about that. If we agree that "Sesame Street" has changed society for the better, if we agree that we still need messages of open-mindedness and if we agree that it is still rare to find an educational TV show that parents and children can watch together, then we have to hope that our furry gang will live on to greet the next generation.