I'm from a generation that was, quite frankly, raised by PBS. Every day in my home, Fred Rogers, Big Bird, and LeVar Burton were on the air, and really, I think I might have learned more from them than from any school-based teacher I had at the same time. Better yet, this was before satellite and high-speed data were used to deliver instructional content to schools -- as a result, all of the K-12 instructional TV went through PBS stations, and schools just set their VCR's to tape whatever they wanted to save for future use. The happy upshot was that any time I was home from school, I could turn on a PBS affiliate station and watch a wide variety of shows on all kinds of topics. When I say variety, I mean it -- individual series might show up a few times a week, but so many programs were in circulation that quite a while would have to go by between repeats. I still remember a lot of the things I saw.
But I digress. Let's get back to Big Bird and Sesame Street. Anyone remember this?
The uploader's chosen title notwithstanding, this is one of those things from PBS that I remember fondly. Look at the comments on the video, and you'll see I'm not alone. Keep in mind Sesame Street's target age group -- these aren't the kids that necessarily need lectures about how robots work. The key to engaging these kids was (and still is!) giving them something fascinating to see and then letting their own curiosity go to work. (It's not a huge leap, for example, to picture just what selection of books a sparked kid might gather on their next trip to the library.)
I read a lot of robot books when I was a kid. I can't say I trace my interest back to this one video, but it had to do something for me to remember it for this long.
The fine people at CTW might not still show this video among the many they include in episodes of Sesame Street. I doubt they would (the video is originally from 1986). What they are still doing is engaging young minds, again, quite possibly far better than most schools would. While PBS isn't carrying K-12 resource programming anymore, they are showing plenty of programming that's sophisticated enough to draw a kid's imagination -- and nowadays, a lot of it is STEM-based. (While the internet is a fantastic conduit, let's face facts. A TV tuned to PBS or PBS Kids is a much safer means of disseminating knowledge to children than is the internet, even with the various parental controls in place.)
Losing funding for PBS isn't an academic issue. It's not a matter of having more pledge marathons to make up the shortfall. Losing funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting means that the vital resource that provides and supplements so very, very many children's educations would no longer be able to function at all. If you're from a generation that grew up watching PBS, stop to consider what growing up would have been like without having that resource to grow on.
We have absolutely nothing in this country that could possibly replace this. At all. Anywhere. We can't cut this. We must preserve it.
4 comments:
I'd still watch PBS. A lot of the content is better than other channels. Also, nice Listserve email.
One very incorrect assumption you are making is that Sesame Street would fail without PBS subsidy. The Sesame Workshop has started multiple times that they receive little funding from PBS and would be fine if they received none at all. They are primarily funded via merchandising and philanthropy.
When PBS was initially created, there was a dearth of good-quality educational content on TV. That's no longer the case at all. It's time to re-evaluate why we created it in the first place and see if we can live without it.
While it is indeed true that Sesame Street/CTW gets a lot of its funding (probably the significant majority) from merchandising and philanthropy, much of the rest of PBS' producers do not. (Many programs, in fact, are produced by PBS stations themselves, which of course rely on CPB. Philanthropic donations aside, those stations are not necessarily self-sustaining.)
We do, however, already have a model for making a public broadcast resource privatized -- TLC, originally The Learning Channel, now headlines Honey Boo-Boo. Its programming was originally governmentally supported (particularly through NASA, I understand). I would question the fate of PBS if that subsidy were to be removed. Would corporate sponsors for programming get a larger say in what gets produced, in return for bigger sponsorships?
Further, there are some (especially rural) areas where PBS is still the primary source of educational programming. While many people have access to a wider variety of programming and resources, many still don't.
Quality is an issue, too. When I was still in the bio labs, more interested parties than I would rant and rave about the exceedingly poor quality of some of the wildlife programming they saw. (Brady Barr was a perennial favorite.) I'm yet to hear someone complain about Nature, but then, Nature isn't trolling for advertising dollars the way NatGeo and Discovery shows would. While we're evaluating what we can live without, we need to consider whether or not we have a place for programming that doesn't focus on the same sort of marketing priorities that network and cable programming so frequently does.
So frequently do. My bad. :/
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