“I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”
Within minutes, the internet
was buzzing with Muppet jokes, and Fired Big Bird was tweeting at Fired Grover.
The hashtag #OccupySesameStreet was born. Muppet John Stewart took over on The
Daily Show. Even President Obama got into the act, joking about Sesame Street
on the campaign trail, and putting out a campaign ad featuring Big Bird.
Interestingly, the debate wasn’t the first time Mr. Romney has
mentioned Big Bird on the campaign trail. According to abcnews.com, Romney has been specifically referencing Big Bird since
December:
“We’re going to have to stop some things we also like. I mean, I like PBS, for instance. I like my grandkids being able to see Bert and Ernie and Big Bird, but I’m not willing to borrow money from China so that PBS doesn’t have to run advertising.” (Romney, March 2012)
Clearly, the comment wasn’t off the cuff,
nor was it unintentional. Going after public funding for the arts, public
radio, and public television is nothing new, but normally that involves
accusations of the liberal elitism of NPR or moral outrage over Piss Christ,
not threatening a beloved American icon. Everyone with a beating human heart
loves Big Bird. Why in the world would Mr. Romney repeatedly – and specifically
– bring him up?
Some have interpreted it as an attempt to
make Mr. Romney seem more human (“All humans love Big Bird. I love Big Bird!
Therefore I am clearly a human”), or to reinforce an image of Mr. Romney as
stern-yet-loving paternal figure (“I like Big Bird too, kids, but we can’t
afford him, and anyway it’s past your bedtime”), or perhaps merely to reassure
us that he lives on the same planet we do (“Sure I have a yacht and an Olympic
horse and four houses, but I love Big Bird – I’m just like you!”).
Maybe that’s all that’s going on here. But
as a teacher who spent the early part of my career working at schools in rural,
low-income areas, I can’t help but wonder about the underlying race and class
issues at play here.
History of Public Television
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was
created by an act of congress and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, in
response to a 1961 speech by then-head of the FCC Newton Minnow, who described
television as a “vast wasteland… a procession of game shows, formula comediesabout totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence,sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters,more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming,cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.” (Some things never change, am I right?)
This speech – commonly known as the
“Wasteland Speech” – advocated for programming in the public interest, which
led to the formation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television,
which in turn led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Put simply, the purpose of public broadcasting was to create “high culture” to
counteract the “wasteland” effects of commercial television’s “low culture.”
Included in the Carnegie Commission’s
recommendations were two revolutionary ideas: that television could be used for
educational purposes, and – more specifically – that television could prepare
children for school. “Public Television programs should give
great attention to the informal educational needs of preschool children,
particularly to interest and help children whose intellectual and cultural
preparation might otherwise be less than adequate.” (Spring, 326)
The Children’s Television Workshop grew out
of the Carnegie Corporation, in the first attempt to bring these revolutionary
ideas to life, and in 1969, they aired the first episode of Sesame Street.
Sesame Street as Educational Gap-Closer
According to Paul D. Slocumb, Ed.D., author
of Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty:
“Students from enriched backgrounds typically perform better in school than those from poverty, as measured by standardized achievement and intelligence tests…. In educated households, the children have environmental opportunities and experiences that foster and encourage skills and academic performance to a level higher than students who don’t have such opportunities. Students from educated households are exposed to more abstract uses of language, more complex planning processes and procedures, schemas to organize space, precise use of words and phrases to describe objects and tasks, assignment of abstract values to time, and labeling part-to-whole relationships. Such exposure allows students to develop mental models, which serve as tools to get meaning from things they read, hear, and experience in school and in the outside world.”
Children of parents with limited income and
education are already at an academic disadvantage by the time they enter
school. Sesame Street was expressly created to help close this achievement gap
between low-income and middle- and upper-income children entering school. Joel
Spring, author of The American School: 1642-1996, describes Sesame Street’s
original educational goals:
“While Sesame Street was supposed to appeal to a national audience, concerns with educating the children of the poor directly influenced the overall goals of the program. [...] The emphasis on preparation for school and concerns about children of the poor determined the basic shape of Sesame Street. The staff decided that poor parents wanted their children to achieve in the basic subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The major complaint of these parents, the staff felt, was the failure of the school to teach these subjects. Therefore, the staff concluded that the program should focus on preparation for learning these subjects in school.”
The desire to help prepare low-income
children for school wasn’t limited to television, of course. Around the same
time, in 1965, as a part of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” campaign, the
Office of Economic Opportunity launched Head Start, originally conceived as a
catch-up summer camp to help get children living in poverty ready for
kindergarten.
Educational television offered one strong
advantage over Head Start and other such programs, however: it was available to
children in all geographic areas. To appeal to children from low-income
families (and in particular, those in urban poverty), Sesame Street was set in
an urban, racially diverse environment, but its creators knew that its success
would come in appealing to all children.
In order to do so, Sesame Street sought to entertain and educate an audience not just of different racial and economic backgrounds, but also of different
ages. Specifically, the Muppet characters were designed to reflect different
developmental stages, in order to cover different curricular needs, to address
the concerns and experiences of different ages, as well as to play to a broader
audience of children. Big Bird, for instance, is modeled after an inquisitive
6-year old, while the impulsive Cookie Monster is babyish, right down to his
grammatical errors (“Me want cookie!”).
The
World as It Might Be
Chief advisor for the Children’s Television
Workshop was Gerald Lesser, Bigelow Professor of Education and Developmental
Psychology at Harvard, who had a great deal of influence over Sesame Street’s
educational and ideological goals. Television, he believed, could offer “a
vision of the world as it might be.”
As an example of this, Lesser described an
urban bus ride, as depicted by Sesame Street:
“Now, we all know that a bus driver is often not our best example of someone who is courteous and civil. But on Sesame Street’s bus trip, the driver responds to his passengers’ hello’s and thank-you’s, tells a child who cannot locate his money, ‘That’s all right, you can pay me tomorrow,’ and upon seeing a young woman running after his bus just as it has left the curb, actually stops to let her on.” (Lesser, 95)
Lesser himself acknowledged this as an
“outrageous misrepresentation” of real life, but “We wanted to show the child
what the world is like when people treat each other with decency and
consideration. Our act of faith… was that young children will learn such
attitudes if we take the trouble to show them some examples, even if we stretch
familiar reality a bit in order to do so." (Lesser, 95)
Another example of this “world as it might
be” vision was in the way Sesame Street’s multi-racial cast lived, worked, and
played together in integrated harmony – while, on the news and in the streets,
white and black civil rights protestors clashed with white police and soldiers.
(In 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to not air the show, stating
that "Mississippi was not yet ready" for the show's integrated cast.
The decision was reversed after the vote was leaked to the New York Times,
gaining national attention. [Newsweek])
Why Sesame Street
Matters
For more than four decades, Sesame Street has done what it
set out to do in the late 1960s: teach basic alphabet, reading, spelling, and
math skills to children while modeling values of kindness, consideration, and friendship.
The magic of Sesame Street is that it’s managed to teach these lessons without
being preachy or pedantic. Could it achieve the same magic while having, as Mr.
Romney suggests, “Big Bird look at cornflakes from time to time”? I don’t know.
Mitt Romney was in his twenties when Sesame Street first
aired, but for those of us who grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 2000s, the cast
– both humans and muppets – feel like old friends. For people my age, Mr.Hooper’s death in 1982 was one of our first – if not the first – experiences of
losing a friend. (And I don’t know about you, but I still get a little choked
up when I think about Big Bird waiting for Santa, shivering and blanketed in
snowflakes, while the residents of the street grow increasingly worried about him.)
For those of us with educated, middle- and upper-income
parents, Sesame Street was a fun, educational show that helped us to ask
questions we might not have asked otherwise, exposed us to racial diversity we
might not have seen otherwise, and made us sing, laugh, and explore our
feelings along the way. But to those of us with uneducated, lower-income
parents who often worked multiple jobs and didn’t have the time, energy, or
skills to read to us, teach us our letters, numbers, and colors, Sesame Street
was an important resource that provided us with the knowledge and skills we
needed to be successful in kindergarten.
Without Sesame Street, Mitt Romney’s grandchildren might
miss the friendship and humor of characters like Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, and
Elmo, but they’d still have access to the early educational opportunities and
skills they needed to be successful in school. They’d be just fine. But other
children – including many of the children of Mr. Romney’s 47% -- would enter
kindergarten facing an even steeper learning curve, one that might prove too
steep to scale in a single year. These children might find themselves falling
farther and farther behind, blaming themselves for their academic struggles, eventually
deciding that they simply weren’t cut out for school, and give up.
Whether or not Mitt Romney likes Big Bird is not the issue. Sesame
Street matters not because it’s likeable, but because it seeks to provide pre-
and early-literacy education to millions of at-risk children, to close an often
overwhelming academic gap, and level the educational playing field so our
children – all of them, regardless of racial, cultural, economic, or educational
background – have full access to the America -- and the American dream -- we've promised them.
