Sesame Street helped children’s education turn a corner
The children’s TV show Sesame Street celebrates its 50th birthday this week. My favourite character should be Count von Count, who shares my fondness for numbers. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Mr Snuffleupagus, Big Bird’s best friend.
Mr Snuffy was thought by every adult on Sesame Street to be imaginary despite being as real as Elmo. It’s a good joke: Mr Snuffy, a strange anteatermammoth hybrid, is colossal. How could the adults not notice him?
After the gag had run for 14 years, the adults finally realised that Mr Snuffleupagus was real, and apologised to Big Bird for doubting him. This was a weighty decision: Sesame
Street’s writers were concerned about child abuse, and reflected it might be unwise to portray the adults as disbelieving what the childlike Big Bird told them.
This was typically painsstaking behaviour from a show that always had ambitious ideas about helping children. In 1967, a former TV producer named Joan Ganz Cooney wrote a report for the Carnegie Corporation titled “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education”. She made the case that carefully crafted television could “foster intellectual and cultural development in pre-schoolers”.
Two years later, her vision became reality in the Children’s Television Workshop, which later became Sesame Street.
It was a radical idea: a few years earlier, Marshall McLuhan had argued that “the medium is the message”. It seemed natural enough to many that TV was an inherently superficial medium with, therefore, a superficial message. By contrast, Sesame
Street was a bet that good TV could make a real difference to children’s readiness for school, particularly for those starved of other opportunities to learn.
Not only would it help them to read and count, but it would be racially integrated. Over the years it would tackle issues including death, divorce, autism, infertility, adoption and HIV.
Researchers swarmed all over Sesame Street, trying to figure out whether it actually worked. One early study, conducted by Samuel Ball and Gerry Ann Bogatz, aimed at a conventional experiment: some families, chosen at random, would be encouraged to sit preschoolers in front of the show, while a control group of other families would receive no encouragement.
The problem was that
Sesame Street became so popular, that it was hard to distinguish between the two groups; everyone was watching. Nevertheless, the study authors found that children who watched more
Sesame Street learnt more, and that “in terms of its own stated goals Sesame Street was in general highly successful”.
Perhaps the message is the message after all. Yet it is hard to be sure about causation. Did
Sesame Street help kids learn? Or was the programme attractive to children who were already flourishing?
A study by economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine approaches the problem from a different angle. They noted that in the early years of
Sesame Street some geographical areas couldn’t receive the show’s broadcast signals. Two-thirds of US children could watch the show, and many did, but one-third could not. Kearney and Levine concluded that the children who had lived in a region where
Sesame Street was available were less likely to fall behind at school. The effect was about as large as attending the US Head Start early childhood education programme — impressive, given that TV is so cheap. The benefits were particularly large for children from deprived areas.
It is hard to read about this study without being reminded that Sesame Street was born in a very different world — one where children received
Sesame Street via UHF broadcast, rather than watching
Baby Shark on YouTube, where a version produced by the South Korean media brand Pinkfong has nearly 4-billion views. Like the Children’s Television
Workshop 50 years ago, Pinkfong has lofty educational goals: its videos are supposed to teach English to Korean children. It has more than twice as many YouTube subscribers as Sesame Street, which struggled financially before cutting a deal with HBO.
But the vast, cosmopolitan and mysterious world of toddler YouTube seems unlikely to deliver the same educational benefits to children as Sesame
Street, which was continually tweaked to help children learn rather than being relentlessly optimised for the clicks. As Alexis Madrigal observed in a long report on toddler YouTube, the viral videos tend to be fastpaced and full of superfluous details. These features may attract the attention of preschoolers, but educational experts think they are unhelpful.
I’m an optimist. Online video could surely be even more educational than Sesame Street, given its ability to be interactive and to gather data on a child’s progress. But it would have to be carefully designed and tested, in the same way Sesame Street was. An educational revolution doesn’t happen by accident.
ONLINE VIDEO COULD SURELY BE EVEN MORE EDUCATIONAL THAN SESAME STREET, GIVEN ITS ABILITY TO BE INTERACTIVE