Sesame Street Changing The World

I can't get enough of Sesame Street. It's smart, funny, educational in a real way that kids need to see, and it addresses serious issues by example, not by preaching. From Newsweek:

But the show was never just about improving test scores. Perhaps the most radical part of the Sesame DNA has always been its social activism. From the start, Sesame targeted lower-income, urban kids—the ones who lived on streets with garbage cans sitting in front of their rowhouse apartments. The show arrived on the heels of riots in Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland and Chicago, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Chester Pierce, a Harvard professor who founded the Black Psychiatrists of America, was one of the show's original advisers, and he was acutely aware of the racism his 3-year-old daughter would face in that hostile time. "It was intentional from the beginning to show different races living together," says David Kleeman, executive director of the American Center for Children and Media. "They were very conscious of the modeling that kids and parents would take away from that."

In 1969, that was still a radical notion in some corners of the country. Here was a TV show putting African-Americans on a level playing field with white characters, showing them not as servants or entertainers, but as equals. (Though it should be noted that when the show premiered, some African-Americans took offense to Oscar the Grouch, who accepts his poverty rather than fighting against it, as a demeaning stand-in for inner-city blacks.) An integrated program aimed at impressionable children was too much for the good people of Mississippi. The state's commission for educational television banned the show in May 1970. Cooney called it "a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi," and news reports saw her outrage and raised it. The state finally reversed itself, 22 days later. When you think about what the world might have looked like without Sesame, you can't dismiss the impact of putting Gordon and Susan into America's living rooms. Is it too much of a stretch to claim that the man in the White House might not be there without Sesame Street? "I like to think," Cooney says, "that we had something to do with Obama's election."

Sometimes simplicity is the way to go. Not just with kids, with all of us. Sesame Street was successful in defining a new "normal" in its shows. Not just in this country, but all over the world.