{"id":30940,"date":"2021-02-01T12:19:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T17:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=30940"},"modified":"2021-01-20T20:13:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T01:13:52","slug":"has-educational-tv-sesame-street-been-discredited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/01\/has-educational-tv-sesame-street-been-discredited\/","title":{"rendered":"Has educational TV (Sesame Street) been discredited?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My friend is fully recovered from COVID-19 (previous post<\/a>). As part of his twin passions for minimum effort parenting and ensuring that his children go to an elite university (just like mom and dad!), he has been parking the 3-year-old in front of Sesame Street<\/a><\/em>. I said that I admired his dedication to making sure that the child got to see Dr. Bill Cosby<\/a>, but that the kid would be bored catatonic by anything from PBS:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Educational PBS TV was a creation of marijuana-fogged urban elites of the 1960s and 70s. I would think that it has been totally discredited by now. Learning the alphabet over and over again? How does that help a child who can learn it in 20 minutes once old enough? Shaun the Sheep<\/a><\/em> is good for kids 3+ in my opinion and there is plenty of mental challenge in following a narrative story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So… that’s the question for today. Has the idea that children can learn useful stuff about arithmetic, reading, etc. from a TV show such as Sesame Street<\/em> been discredited or not? “It may be educational, but what is that TV show really teaching your preschooler?” <\/a>implies that there might be some education, but that children learn to be aggressive as well. “Why TV toddlers are lost for words: Educational programmes do not help young children develop language”<\/a> (Daily Mail<\/em>, 2014)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Our kids watch about 20 minutes of TV per day, on average, and content is selected purely for entertainment value, e.g., the movie Soul <\/a><\/em>on which their cousin worked as an animator. What can be learned from Soul<\/em>? Not history! A character refers to Charles Drew<\/a> as the inventor of blood transfusions when, in fact, successful human blood transfusions<\/em><\/a> <\/em>were developed 100+ years prior to Dr. Charles Drew’s work in blood banking<\/em>. (There is no mention of Dr. Charles Drew’s colleague, Dr. Jill Biden, MD.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From SeaWorld Orlando<\/a>, February 2020:<\/p>\n\n\n\n