08/02/2025
“Sesame Street” and its sequel, “The Electric Company,” were, “with lapses, the most intelligent and important programs in television,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972. When the show aired, in the late 1960s, it drew attention for its embrace of multiculturalism, flashy appearances from celebrities and public figures (including James Earl Jones and Jesse Jackson), and radical approach of using the television to promote children’s education. At the time, Adler observed that 97 per cent of American households had televisions, and 80 per cent of the country’s 12 million preschool children had watched the show. It had a significant impact on children’s learning: children from poor or middle-class families who watched “Sesame Street” did better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who did not.
“It is as though all the lessons of New Deal federal planning and the ’60s experience of the ‘local people,’ the techniques of the totalitarian slogan and the American commercial, the devices of film and the cult of the famous, the research of educators and the talent of artists had combined in one small experiment to sell, by means of television, the rational, the humane, and the linear to little children,” Adler wrote. As the federal government continues its defunding of public media, Revisit Adler’s review: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/gtAqkq
