Getting to Sesame Street (2022)

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NPR

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

American schools have always been more than where we go to learn the ABCs: They're places where socialization happens and cultural norms are developed. And arguments over what those norms are and how they're communicated tend to flare up during moments of cultural anxiety — like the one we're in now.

When it premiered in 1969, the kids' TV show Sesame Street was part of a larger movement to reach lower-income, less privileged and more "urban" children. It was part of LBJ's Great Society agenda. And though it was funded in part by taxpayer dollars, Sesame Street is a TV show, not a classroom, and it set out to answer the question of what it means to educate kids. Today: how a television show made to represent Harlem and the Bronx reached children across a divided country, and how the conversations on the street have changed alongside us

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the late afternoon on a Monday. I'm four years old, sitting crisscross applesauce
0:19.9	on the floor of my parents' apartment. The carpet is shaggy, ugly and brown. I have a
0:26.5	cherubic face and bowl haircut, you know, like the one Jim Carey has in the film
0:31.2	Dumb and Dumber. In front of me is a TV with an antenna and dial. It's the late
0:36.5	1980s. And on this screen is my daily companion,
0:40.5	Sessing Street. Today is a very special day because today's the day when my
0:48.9	little sister Alice meets my best friend Bird. My family had only recently moved
1:00.8	to the US from Iran and I was lonely. I couldn't speak English, I couldn't make
1:06.4	sense of where we were or what had brought us here. In that moment where I needed
1:11.6	a lifeline, Sessing Street with its weird tasks of characters was there. The
1:17.8	giant animals, monsters, muppets, the kind adults and children everywhere on
1:24.5	the street. I learned English watching Sessing Street. I learned how to deal
1:33.5	with loss, anger, sadness, loneliness. When my parents who were dealing with
1:39.3	their own trauma and working constantly to make rent weren't there, I learned
1:43.9	from Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Susan and Gordon. It was a window into a whole new
1:49.5	world. A safe, accepting, beautiful, American world.
1:54.4	I wake up in my house, it's called a bed. The name's Kermit.
2:08.8	Whatever you say, Frustre, it is you. I just opened my mouth and
2:14.1	it's amazing. But I wasn't alone. In millions of other homes,
2:26.1	millions of other young children like me were sitting in front of their TVs
2:30.7	watching the same show I was. And some of those children grew up to work right
2:36.4	here on Thurline. I watched Sessing Street in the early 90s when I was
	...

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