Getting to Sesame Street

Throughline

NPR

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In American history, schools have not just been places to learn the ABCs – they're places where socialization happens and cultural norms are developed. Arguments over how and what those norms are and how they're communicated tend to flare up during moments of cultural anxiety. Sesame Street was part of a larger movement in the late 1960s to reach lower income, less privileged and more "urban" audiences. It was part of LBJ's Great Society agenda. But Sesame Street is a TV show - not a classroom. And it was funded in part by taxpayer dollars. This story is about how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods – like Harlem and the Bronx – has sustained its mark in educating children in a divided country.

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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 this
1:24.6	street. I learned English watching Sessing Street. I learned how to deal with
1:33.6	loss, anger, sadness, loneliness. When my parents who were dealing with their
1:39.4	own trauma and working constantly to make rent weren't there, I learned from
1:44.1	Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Susan and Gordon. It was a window into a whole new world. A
1:50.2	safe, accepting, beautiful, American world.
2:06.8	The name's Kermit.
2:09.1	Whatever you say, Funky, it is you. Just open my mouth and...
2:22.6	But I wasn't alone. In millions of other homes, millions of other young children,
2:28.1	like me, were sitting in front of their TVs watching the same show I was. And
2:32.8	some of those children grew up to work right here on Thurline. I watched
2:41.6	Sessing Street in the early 90s when I was a kid. From the early 1970s, so right,
	...

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