[Cincinatus' Wife]

The paper from the University of Maryland’s Melissa Kearney and Wellesley College’s Phillip Levine finds that the show has left children more likely to stay at the appropriate grade level for their age, an effect that is particularly pronounced among boys, African Americans and children who grow up in disadvantaged areas.

LINK to paper: Study Finds Sesame Street Improves School Readiness

[stanne]

Anecdotally. No

College professors blame SS in particular for their students’ demand to be entertained

[C210N]

It's real purpose is to train at the earliest ages, our kids on how to use a remote control, and the gateway to a lifetime of indoctrination and passivity.

[gdani]

No surprise. Since its introduction, the Children's Television Workshop had in mind using TV to educate with Sesame Street being the vehicle to do that.

(Source - wrote a paper in college decades ago about this very subject. Was fascinated at how deliberate CTW's specific goals were).

[SpaceBar]

Sesame Street has always served up garbage. When I was a kid, my older brother got a beautiful Zeiss biological microscope. He had prepared slides of bacteria, and learned how to use biological stains, a microtome and other techniques. He showed me living unicellular creatures living in a ditch by our house. That exposure got me into science while my brother eventually became an attorney, go figure. Counting to eleven with a stuffed animal isn’t education, it’s dumbing down.

[ansel12]

It always looked like political conditioning to me.

[Zack Attack]

It has been many years but I don’t ever remember kindergarten as being educational so much as its primary benefit for me being making friends and connecting with others your age - something TV can’t teach you.

Kindergarten today, idk, it may be nothing but an indoctrination check-in point.

[US Navy Vet]

Look at just WHO “Children’s Television Workshop(Sesame Street)’s” partners ARE; http://www.sesameworkshop.org/partners/partners/ LOTS AND LOTS of “Questionable” “Characters”!

[don-o]

“Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television. “Sesame Street” appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time.

Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle.

At the same time, “Sesame Street” relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance....

We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.”

― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2337731-amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business

[Steamburg]

That speaks very badly about the incompetents who teach preschool.

[KosmicKitty]

And I have also seen its effect at the college level as well.

Better make your powerpoints jump and sing and don’t make the students read anything more than a page without graphics because just plain lectures and text are just too boring for the media raised generation.