Like any grown-ups, then or now, they worried about the power that television had over children. The full-volume blare, the raucously random chaos, the cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs — ka-bam! Pow! Sproiiinng!HEY KIDS!!
The origin story of “Sesame Street,” which has become a permanent piece of cultural history and TV lore, begins at a Manhattan dinner party in the “Mad Men” years. Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer in public-affairs programming, listened to her friend Lloyd Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corp., describe the way his preschool-aged daughter soaked up everything she saw on TV.
Television is often the problem, but sometimes it’s the answer, too. That dinner party in 1966 started a lasting conversation: What if there was a show that was just as mesmerizing as Saturday cartoons, but instead of breakfast-cereal commercials, the jingles would sell letters and numbers? Or shapes and similarities? And introduce concepts like in, on and under? Could it help kids learn? Could it, in some measurable way, prepare the nation’s less advantaged children for school?
Cooney and Morrisett looked to Harvard University and other institutions, convening curriculum experts, cognitive psychologists and early-childhood researchers to compare notes. There were meetings, seminars and serious arguments about methodology and outcomes.