12m Children In U.S. Watch “Sesame Street”

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32321, 12 June 1970, Page 3

12m Children In U.S. Watch “Sesame Street”

(An extract from an article in the “Economist” about cable television) Before getting into why and how life ha? become brighter for owners of cable systems, one must sajF that American non-commercial television has had its first, long-overdue and unquestionably resounding success.

It has produced a children’s television programme that really teaches. Called “Sesame Street,” the series finished its first season last month, with the kind of kudos reserved for Broadway musicals and returned astronauts.

As cheeky, fist-paced and cheerfully inter-racial as “Hair,” “Sesame Street” was designed to give the pre-

school child in the slums the same awareness of numbers, letters and logical concepts that the middle-class child has when he enters school. The programme draws heavily on both Skinnerian stimulus-response psychology and on Madison Avenue’s advertising techniques. Children like to succeed, they like rock music, they like commercial advertisements better than anything else on television. These truths, combined with a refreshing willingness to admit that most children are more familiar with bricks than with grass and with ice cream vans than with horses, combined to make “Sesame Street” work. The show, produced by the Children’s Television Workshop, has been praised by President Nixon and by those who interpret the statistics on what practical difference the series has made to those who watch it. (One trouble in gathering future statistics

will be the difficulty in finding “uncontaminated” | control groups; 12 million children watch it every week-day and even commer-i cial channels are showing it.) ■ But “Sesame Street” costs, money, lots of it. Last year’s' series cost about $8 million: some of it came from the Corporation for Public Broad-1 casting, some from federal government agencies, some from the Ford Foundation. And there are those who will I argue that, far from being America’s pride, “Sesame Street” is America’s shame. “AU that money that has been poured into educational television all these years,” they say, “and the United States has come up with • only one good programme.” Other critics claim that it reaches mainly the middle classes, who do not need it, and still others that the ability to rattle off numbers i is no “Open Sesame” to real i education at all.