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There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be. From https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/21/obey-the-coo

There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be. From https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/21/obey-the-cookie-monster-sesame-street-and-social/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/21/obey-the-cookie-mons...: Not long ago the new television ad featuring Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster pitching the iPhone 6 would have been considered a deplorable exploitation of children’s culture for profit. But this final collapse of a putatively public educational project into the realm of corporate marketing caused little stir, quite possibly because Big Capitalism was written into Sesame Street’s DNA from Day One. Sesame Street was born as a ruling class experiment in social control, managed and funded by the Carnegie Endowment in concert with the Ford Foundation and federal agencies. Carnegie’s Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) created the show as a conscious response to late 60s urban insurrections and African-American revolutionary sentiment.”

allturtles 5y ago
> There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be. If there's anything to suggest it, it's not in this article. The author seems to be angry that a children's television program was not designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution.
- quacked 5y ago
  That's hilarious, because I've recently been a little annoyed because I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution. The designers of Sesame Street were open supporters of a great deal of collectivist and proto-socialist policies (look at Joan Ganz Cooney's Wikipedia page), and literally created a state-funded educational vehicle as their life's work. One of the key recurring themes of Sesame Street is "you should share what you have with others", and its implied pairing, "there's something wrong with you if you don't share what you have with others". To be fair, I don't know how well any of that worked on anyone. I watched Sesame Street when I was young and I certainly didn't retain those lessons. I think the more enduring lesson that Sesame Street unintentionally teaches people is "it's normal to learn things from the TV".
  - WalterGR 5y ago
    I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution. One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US. You can find hundreds of articles on encouraging your children to share in US parenting magazines. That hundreds of millions of children who grew up in the US were encouraged to share as part of some kind of sinister socialist plot is... fanciful.
    - secabeen 5y ago
      > One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US. I have seen a small amount of dialing back on this in the preschools my kids went to. Kids are encouraged to share, and they can't be possessive of a toy, but they aren't required to share, or to give up a favorite item to another kid. If kid 1 wants to play with a truck for a whole hour, that's fine. Kid 2 just has to wait, or find something else. However, once kid 1 sets down the truck to go on the slide, it's fair game to kid 2.
    - UncleSlacky 5y ago
      I recall a Fox News segment a few years ago (can't find a link to it now) about how encouraging sharing in schools would lead to socialism/communism.
      - quacked 5y ago
        I'm sure neither you nor I watch Fox News; I typically recommend people ignore cable news completely. What does lead to socialism/communism is the modern urban/suburban American lifestyle. If you grow up in a fully state-funded education system, have all of your personal outcomes controlled and motivated by government initiatives, and live in a city that is ostensibly fully controlled (facilities, transportation, construction, etc.) by the government, you start to believe that all good things come from the state, and you start to believe that all problems can be fixed by more legislation and rules, paid for by more taxes and enforced by state actors. I've been around too many disparate sets of people whose only understanding of how large-scale problems can be solved is "more government" to think that I'm seeing a phenomenon that's unique to my own experience. Most American citizens are disconnected from law, fighting, farming, construction, manufacturing, etc., and the ones that aren't usually range from weak to strong conservative.
mycologos 5y ago
That article seems to just be a sequence of innuendos and insinuations meant to surround Sesame Street with unsavory associations without ever actually providing evidence of them. Seriously, they're arguing that Sesame Street is responsible for advertisers copying their format and failing to teach long-form critical thinking to pre-schoolers.

allturtles 5y ago

> There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be. If there's anything to suggest it, it's not in this article. The author seems to be angry that a children's television program was not designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution.

quacked 5y ago
That's hilarious, because I've recently been a little annoyed because I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution. The designers of Sesame Street were open supporters of a great deal of collectivist and proto-socialist policies (look at Joan Ganz Cooney's Wikipedia page), and literally created a state-funded educational vehicle as their life's work. One of the key recurring themes of Sesame Street is "you should share what you have with others", and its implied pairing, "there's something wrong with you if you don't share what you have with others". To be fair, I don't know how well any of that worked on anyone. I watched Sesame Street when I was young and I certainly didn't retain those lessons. I think the more enduring lesson that Sesame Street unintentionally teaches people is "it's normal to learn things from the TV".
- WalterGR 5y ago
  I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution. One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US. You can find hundreds of articles on encouraging your children to share in US parenting magazines. That hundreds of millions of children who grew up in the US were encouraged to share as part of some kind of sinister socialist plot is... fanciful.
  - secabeen 5y ago
    > One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US. I have seen a small amount of dialing back on this in the preschools my kids went to. Kids are encouraged to share, and they can't be possessive of a toy, but they aren't required to share, or to give up a favorite item to another kid. If kid 1 wants to play with a truck for a whole hour, that's fine. Kid 2 just has to wait, or find something else. However, once kid 1 sets down the truck to go on the slide, it's fair game to kid 2.
  - UncleSlacky 5y ago
    I recall a Fox News segment a few years ago (can't find a link to it now) about how encouraging sharing in schools would lead to socialism/communism.
    - quacked 5y ago
      I'm sure neither you nor I watch Fox News; I typically recommend people ignore cable news completely. What does lead to socialism/communism is the modern urban/suburban American lifestyle. If you grow up in a fully state-funded education system, have all of your personal outcomes controlled and motivated by government initiatives, and live in a city that is ostensibly fully controlled (facilities, transportation, construction, etc.) by the government, you start to believe that all good things come from the state, and you start to believe that all problems can be fixed by more legislation and rules, paid for by more taxes and enforced by state actors. I've been around too many disparate sets of people whose only understanding of how large-scale problems can be solved is "more government" to think that I'm seeing a phenomenon that's unique to my own experience. Most American citizens are disconnected from law, fighting, farming, construction, manufacturing, etc., and the ones that aren't usually range from weak to strong conservative.

mycologos 5y ago

That article seems to just be a sequence of innuendos and insinuations meant to surround Sesame Street with unsavory associations without ever actually providing evidence of them. Seriously, they're arguing that Sesame Street is responsible for advertisers copying their format and failing to teach long-form critical thinking to pre-schoolers.