In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children?
A few years earlier, Newton N. Minow, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had famously condemned television programs for children as “a vast wasteland” of “cartoons, violence, and more violence.” Unknown to Cooney, Morrisett, who has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University, was already pouring money into various projects aimed at bolstering preschool education for disadvantaged children. But those efforts were frustratingly modest in scope. “There was a huge gap between what we were doing and what we were trying to achieve,” Morrisett recalls. Their casual conversation led Cooney, a few weeks later, to propose a daily TV program, complete with music, puppets, and stories. By Morrisett and Cooney’s second meeting, “a primitive outline of a project that more than faintly resembles Sesame Street began to emerge,” writes Michael Davis in his new book, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (Viking).
Cooney embarked on a three-month tour of colleges and universities to interview what Davis, a journalist, describes as “a hit list of sages and scholars.” One particularly influential thinker was Gerald S. Lesser, an unassuming, sneaker-clad professor of education (now emeritus) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who was an expert on how children consume television. Cooney synthesized her findings into a 55-page document called “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education,” citing new research in cognitive development that indicated how the “emotional, physical, and intellectual needs [of children] are doubtless interdependent from infancy on.” As to the central question of whether a television series could in fact be an effective educational tool, she was unequivocal: “I believe the answer is a resounding yes.”
Morrisett invited Lesser to New York to discuss how Sesame Street’s pedagogical content might best be presented and evaluated. Lesser, who became the program’s educational director, suggested that scholars of education be directly involved in script development, and that those scripts be tested in a classroom before filming. In addition, he thought that researchers should go back to those classrooms to confirm the effectiveness of a show after it had aired.
“Never before had anyone viewed a children’s show as a living laboratory,” Davis writes. “Never before had anyone thought to commingle writers and social-science researchers, a forced marriage that, with surprising ease and good humor, endured and thrived.” Lesser, who is author of Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street (Random House, 1974), convened the first of five seminars with scholars who were at least willing, as he puts it, to “think hard about television for children, a topic that many academics might dismiss as trivial.”
Almost four years after the Cooney dinner party, on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street showed up on public television across the country. The series was greeted with a torrent of gushing reviews. “The show moves, seduces, diverts, dazzles, amuses, and infects,” raved a writer at Variety. “Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun,” noted another critic. Children’s television would never be the same.
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“Television was a no-no among intellectuals,” Cooney says to Davis in an interesting aside. Years before she helped build Sesame Street, Cooney did some work for the Partisan Review, the legendary — and now defunct — journal of culture and ideas. Indeed, decrying television has long been a favorite pastime of intellectuals. Lewis Mumford, Jules Henry, and Herbert Marcuse all called it hopelessly lowbrow and mind-numbing. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury presented television as a mechanism of mind control. Even Marshall McLuhan, otherwise an enthusiast of the medium, disparaged TV for “hypnotizing the viewer.”
As Lynn Spigel writes in her new book, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (University of Chicago Press), “in the postwar period, literary critics, journalists, and sociologists variously depicted television as the enemy of books and the literary culture of reading.” But that critique, she adds, ignores “the numerous cross-media exchanges between fine artists, commercial artists, museum curators, and TV producers in the early broadcast era.” Network television was not quite the cultural wasteland that Minow imagined.
When, in the late 1940s, modern art became a sensation among the American public, the phenomenon was due in large part to television’s unique ability to package modern art as an everyday matter. “As a living-room fixture, television offered audiences a way to feel ‘at home’ with modernism and to experience art as a form of home entertainment,” writes Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University. As early as 1941, the Metropolitan Museum of Art partnered with CBS to produce a series of experimental television programs, and by 1948 the Museum of Modern Art had aired shows on NBC, CBS, and local New York networks, “using television as a kind of second gallery,” Spigel writes. NBC’s first nationwide color-compatible show, broadcast in 1954, was called A Visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the years to come, the networks frequently used paintings to promote the latest in color-television technology.
Spigel argues that the relationship between network television and the larger arena of post-World War II art was a wellspring of mutual creativity — a fact most evident in commercials from that era. Advertising agencies launched in-house art departments dedicated to television, and they often drew on the latest innovations in graphic design. Likewise the networks hired a host of A-list artists and became centers of groundbreaking design. “In this regard,” Spigel writes, “both television programs and commercials provided unique opportunities for nationwide audiences to see modern art and design.”
Consider Andy Warhol, who, to an extent greater than almost any other figure of the postwar era, explored the outer limits of television as an artistic medium. In 1968, Warhol, who had already made a name for himself as a commercial artist, made a one-minute commercial for Schrafft’s, a restaurant in New York. That legendary advertisement, known as the “Underground Sundae,” was billed as a “phantasmagoria of color” — and in the final frame, Warhol’s iconic signature runs diagonally across the screen. “Taking author’s credit,” Spigel writes, “Warhol approached the TV commercial as an artist’s medium.” The magazine Art in America marveled at how the commercial “opens up a whole new area for artists to explore.” Even when Warhol’s work fell flat, Spigel notes, his efforts “demonstrate how it was possible to innovate within the system of commercial TV.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B13