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Amongst Lovely Things

© Allan Lee

The most effective kind of education, said the Greek philosopher Plato, is that a child should play amongst lovely things. Not much has changed, I suspect, in the two-and-a-half thousand years since he wrote that.

The child of today is exposed to the world in a way that no other generation has seen. Traditional forms of broadcasting – television and radio – have been joined by cable and satellite TV and radio channels, and by Internet wide and narrowcasting. The child of today has access to information that was never dreamed of even 50 years ago, let alone when Plato was writing.

So what ‘lovely things’ do broadcasters serve up for their younger viewers? Is it, as the broadcasters suggest, a collection of well thought-out and executed educational programmes designed to broaden the mind? Or is it, as other might fear, a mixture of cheap, violent, catchpenny productions designed to sell merchandise as successfully as possible?

The answer, of course, is somewhere in between – but it’s not all bad, by any means.

The Children’s Television Workshop

A shining light in all of this is the Children’s Television Workshop, the creators of the evergreen Sesame Street. The show began as an experiment in the late 1960s and debuted on US TV in November 1969. It aimed – and continues to aim - to give pre-schoolers the skills they needed to make the transition from home to school. Some of the show’s catchphrases – “this show is brought to you by the letter J”, etc – have become legends. The programme’s focus on disadvantaged inner-city children, its emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic, and on social skills, put it light years ahead of any rivals. There’s plenty for your kids to do and see as well as background information for parents at the CTW website. Sesame Street claims to be the most researched and tested children’s show in television history – and along the way it has picked up more Emmy awards than any show for adults or children.

The lynchpins of the shows are, of course, not real people at all, but Muppets. Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy et al all got their start in showbiz on Sesame Street. Jim Henson’s classic creations spawned an industry of their own, but it is the anarchic but child-like behaviour of the Muppets which gives Sesame Street its unique flavour. All you could possibly want to know about the Muppets is to be found at Bill Sherman’s Muppets Home Page . You can read about the exploits of one of the Sesame Street puppeteers, at Rick Lyon’s home page.