With a small sigh, four-year-old Nancy settles her thumb in her mouth and herself next to her grandmother. The screen in front of them throbs into strident action. Blasts of music and color, brighter and louder than life, assail her consciousness. A confusing melee of animation churns forth as characters, seated around a dinner table, leap up and down shouting a harsh and hurried parody of human conversation. What are they yelling about? A winter storm rages violently on the sound track, doors slam, dishes crash; the overwhelming sound effects drown out the few words that might be intelligible.
"What is it? What is it? What is it?" whines two-year-old Peter, running to the screen and pointing anxiously at something. But Peter's question remains unanswered. Under his insistent finger the scene and characters alter, the action races relentlessly along, and Peter retreats to Grandmother's other side, also sucking a thumb.
From across the room I am stunned by Sesame Street's sensory assault. I am equally unnerved by the transformation of these lively, curious children, who, five minutes earlier, had been chattering enthusiastically as they investigated the workings of my pocket tape recorder. Although some parents report that children who watch TV regularly become very active during the program, the response of Nancy and Peter is much more typical of novice viewers. We are all, in fact, overwhelmed as we sit, silent, engulfed by a cacophony of vignettes that change, literally, by the minute; Sesame Street segments run anywhere from thirty or forty-five seconds up to a rare maximum of three minutes. Muppets, people, objects, cartoons, cascade inexorably -- each scene arrestingly novel and removed both visually and contextually from the last. Within twenty minutes we are propelled from Spain or Mexico (the pace is so rapid it is hard to tell) to the streets of New York, to a zoo, behind the set of a television studio, and to a game show. A cartoon history of the growing of peanuts and making of peanut butter is shown in fifty seconds, narrated by a voice mimicking an antebellum Southern accent. "It gr-ao-ws in the gr-ao-u-nd!" we are told. Nancy looks up, puzzled. Grandmother starts to explain, but the children's attention is instantly captured by numerals that leap onto the screen to dance, jump, metamorphose -- appear, disappear, grow larger, smaller, in the flick of an eyelash.
"One, two, three," shouts a disembodied voice. H floats by, suddenly experiencing an explosion of parts that transform it to h. "H," the voice intones, but immediately h is gone and we are on a street in London where cartoon characters shout a slapstick routine that features rhyming sounds, unrelated in any discernible way to the previous "teaching." Unfortunately, their abrasively contrived dialects and the rapid pace of the jargon obscures both content and rhyme. Grandmother tries to repeat the rhyming words, but she is drowned out as we are swept into a new surge of music.
"Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu!" imitates Peter, picking up one intelligible sound from a character who sounds as if he is suffering from some sort of speech impediment.
A pulsating red numeral 3 appears, capering among a series of boxes. "Three," blasts the sound track amid more sounds of crashing and banging. Now 3 becomes a ball and leaps into the final box, which is immediately transformed (to an adult's eyes) into some sort of grinder; in a second, 3 is decomposed and pours out the spout as red powder.
"What happened to it?" asks Grandma.
"I don't know," says Nancy, registering surprise.
But there is no time to discuss this hidden machinery of cause and effect -- to clarify the chimerical "magic" that transforms reality without human action or experience. Comprehension is superfluous.
CONFRONTING A SACRED COW
"But at Least It's Educational . . ."
The worst thing about Sesame Street is that people believe it is educationally valuable. It stands as a symbol of "good" programming, an institutionalized excuse for "boob tube" as baby-sitter. Well-intentioned parents earnestly swallow the dictum: "It helps children learn."
But what are they learning? First, that we expect them to enjoy this manipulative sensory assault. With habit, of course, they may indeed grow to "love" it, perhaps as smokers desire their prebreakfast cigarette. Human sensory organs -- and the brains attached to them -- grow accustomed to, even need, often repeated experiences. If children tell us they "love" Sesame Street, we should not decide it is ipso facto good for them; we should more likely be concerned about what has been done to their brains that enables them to tolerate -- much less enjoy -- it!
"Just because children do something willingly, even eagerly, is not sufficient reason to believe it engages their minds," cautions Dr. Lillian Katz, author of Engaging Children's Minds. [1] "And remember, enjoyment, per se, is not an appropriate goal for education." [2]
Yet children have also bought into the notion that Sesame Street is both "good" for them and educational. A typical platitude was recently expressed by a youngster interviewed for a national radio program. [3] "It teaches kids to read," he declared, confirming his adult-fostered delusions about the fundamental nature of the reading process. Like this little boy, who may be forgiven a certain degree of disillusionment when he gets to school, many children solemnly mouth the reassurances of their elders; yes, indeed, this is "education"!
Although Sesame Street's major raison d'etre has been to improve the educational prognosis for the disadvantaged, the gulf between socioeconomic groups and the failure rate of poor school children grows daily to ever more frightening proportions. Clearly, a single program cannot be expected to reverse major societal changes. Poor children also tend to watch much more commercial television, with less supervision, than others, factors linked to poorer school performance. Yet, as we shall see, several aspects of Sesame Street's chosen format may be particularly damaging to the most needy of all.
Many hours of viewing Sesame Street have convinced me that adults who endorse it give children an erroneous message about what learning feels like. It is truly amazing that everyone seems to have bought the notion that this peripatetic carnival will somehow teach kids to read -- despite the fact that the habits of the mind necessary to be a good reader are exactly what Sesame Street does not teach: language, active reflection, persistence, and internal control. The truth is that most adults have probably not taken the time to sit down and view this program objectively, from the perspective of tender young brains struggling to make the connections that will organize their intellects. They should.
Pervasive, Expensive, and Short on Research
Sesame Street is viewed by almost half of all American preschoolers on a weekly basis -- over 5.8 million children between the ages of two and five watch an average of three episodes per week. Where I live, the program is broadcast three times a day for an hour each time. (In contrast, Reading Rainbow, which actually stimulates book circulation in libraries by engaging its audience with good children's books, is aired once a week at a time when children who can read are in school.) Sesame Street's main influence, however, is not the proportion of total viewing time it occupies, but the messages it conveys -- or fails to -- about learning, about constructive children's programming, and about the responsibility of this overwhelmingly pervasive medium.
Sesame Street is expensive in every respect. Estimates have put the cost of producing each viewing hour anywhere from ninety-two thousand to one million dollars. [4, 5] No one questions that this monumental product reflects good and earnest intentions on the part of its generators and producers, Children's Television Workshop. Yet when we encourage preschoolers to watch Sesame Street, we are programming them to "enjoy" -- and perhaps even need -- overstimulation, manipulation, and neural habits that are antagonistic to academic learning. In my opinion, it is a serious travesty of the educational enterprise particularly because it has assumed the mission and garnered parents' trust.
I am convinced it is not merely a coincidence that our faith in it has coincided with a major decline in reading and learning skills. Uncritical acceptance of Sesame Street as a model for "learning" has been part of a larger infatuation with expedient, product-oriented approaches that denigrate the essence of the educational enterprise. Its substitution of surface glitz for substance has started a generation of children in the seductive school of organized silliness, where their first lesson is that learning is something adults can be expected to make happen for them as quickly and pleasantly as possible. Thus prepared, they can hardly be blamed if they fail to discover for themselves the personal joys -- time consuming as they are -- of serious learning, mental effort, and mastery.
Despite its obviously large budget, the carefully crafted flagship of television's educational armada has not produced significant research by which the effects of its chosen format on either brains or learning abilities can be assessed. Although elaborate "instructional goals" for the program have been promulgated, little accountability for meeting them seems to be built into the system. Almost all of the research done by Children's Television Workshop, in fact, falls in the category of "formative evaluation": production research that mainly tests the program's appeal (i.e., how well it "sells"). [6] "Summative" research, by which the attainment of those instructional goals might be evaluated, has mainly been left up for grabs -- and for the twenty years of its life, few researchers have grabbed. The resulting studies have been piecemeal and inconclusive. Little documentation exists about the overall cognitive effects of Sesame Street despite all the money, time, effort, and good intentions that this program has consumed.
TEN REASONS WHY SESAME STREET IS BAD NEWS FOR READING
Studies showing how young children should be taught to read indicate that Sesame Street is going about the job the wrong way. Moreover, the show fosters inaccurate ideas about what and how preschoolers should be learning.
1. What Is "Brain-Appropriate" Learning for Preschoolers?
Sesame Street has popularized the erroneous belief that it is appropriate for most preschoolers to learn to read. In fact, it is a serious mistake to push reading skills at children before they have completed certain developmental tasks that will give them something to read about -- and the ability to understand it when they do! Moreover, research shows that the correct way for very young children to start to read is not with structured lessons.
Misguided efforts to train preschoolers in skills more appropriate for kindergarten or first grade diverts valuable time and attention from their real learning needs. To become good readers children first need help in installing the cognitive and language furnishings that will make the brain a comfortable place for real literacy to dwell! During the early years these are best learned through active, hands-on experiences (e.g., playing, building, exploring, talking), imaginative social play, and listening with enjoyment to good children's literature, not from a medium which has made a science of taking control of the viewer's attention.
Preschoolers also need to practice the fine motor skills that will eventually enable them to write. New research indicates that the increase in dysgraphia (difficulty with handwriting) plaguing the schools may be related to the fact that children have spent so much more time in front of the TV than in free play and activities such as bead stringing, sewing cards, carpentry, sand and water play, crayoning designs, cutting out shapes, and other natural and appropriate learning activities. [7 ]Sesame Street could -- and should -- do much more to encourage them.
The mechanics of naming letters or "sounding out" words, as important as they will eventually be, are better saved for later -- usually around age six. Many, perhaps even most, preschoolers' brains are not prepared to cope with connecting written symbols (letters) to sounds ("B says buh','). Some young brains can glue these together with remarkable ease; others, including many bright ones, do not. If well-meaning adults are encouraged to force the issue, they may create problems ranging from disaffection to disability. [8]
Many experts now believe that early pressure to remember letters and their sounds may cause learning problems for some children, especially those whose environments have not primed them for literacy. At the very least, youngsters who are mystified by the meaning of the dancing symbols on the screen may be picking up feelings of bewilderment about phonics -- and about their own inability to understand something that everybody seems to think is so important. If teaching letter sounds to preschoolers really were important, it might be worth the risk. But it is not!
2. The Empty Alphabet vs. Language Meaning
Reading is not walking on words. It's grasping the soul of them. -- Paolo Freire
Sesame Street has overemphasized letters and numerals and underemphasized the language and thinking skills necessary to make them meaningful. Contrary to what most parents believe, learning the alphabet is only a minor part of learning to read. Overall language development is much more important. Yet back in the mists of reading research, some quite misleading studies "proved" that kindergarteners' ability to recognize alphabet letters was a good predictor of their reading success at the end of first grade. As is too often the case, people who did not understand that a correlation (relationship) of this kind does not necessarily imply causation decided that teaching alphabets would make children learn to read faster. The truth of the situation is somewhat different.
Alphabet (or "letter-sound") recognition by three-, four-, and five-year-olds might be viewed as a symptom, not a cause, of the type of brain that will acquire reading easily: (1) it comes from an environment with exposure to books and print; (2) it can, through a combination of nature and experiential stimulation, remember a sequence of spoken sounds and attach them to printed letters; (3) it is mature enough to make these connections with ease. This type of brain is likely to learn to read quite readily, whether someone drills it on the alphabet or not. Conversely, simply teaching the brain to have the surface "symptom" will not create the underlying abilities.
Children who buy Sesame Street's implicit message that alphabet letters are the major key to reading are headed for trouble. When researchers ask groups of poor readers what reading is all about, they tend to say something like: "sounding out the words." When good readers are asked the same question, they give answers such as, "Understanding what the words and the sentences say." Somehow the poor readers have failed to pick up the idea that reading must take them far beyond the alphabet into an active search for meaning.
Children must have good language development before they can get the meaning. Ability to recognize printed letters and words gets children through early reading instruction. After grade 3, however, overall listening comprehension (e.g., the ability to understand and remember stories or reports they have heard) is much more closely related to students' reading comprehension than their ability to read the words themselves! [8, 10] Many long-term studies show that children superior in oral language in kindergarten and first grade are the ones who eventually excel in reading and writing in the middle grades.
When it comes to learning these uses of language, early environment is the critical factor. From the University of Umea in Sweden, Dr. Ingvar Lundberg, who has been working on a large study of children's reading development in all the Scandinavian countries, reports that even though Scandinavian children do not enter school until age seven, most pick up basic decoding (alphabet and word-reading) skills without difficulty. At that point, however, the effects of the preschool language environment become evident in the level of their reading comprehension.
"Right now we are in the process of looking at the effects on comprehension of a lot of early things happening," Lundberg reports. "If you have adequate teaching (in school), regardless of a lot of external circumstances, a majority of kids will certainly learn how to decode ["sound out" the words], but a majority of kids will certainly not have a guaranteed development of comprehension just by a reasonably good school environment. It seems that home factors play a very considerable role as far as comprehension is concerned." [11]
Given these well-recognized facts, it is disheartening to observe that Sesame Street itself provides such a poor language model. Although apologists for the program claim that its sentence length and grammatical complexity are appropriate for young children, [12] the only study I could locate on this topic failed to take into account the pace, clarity, or volume level of the characters' speech. Even a casual observer soon becomes aware that most of the characters talk too fast and shift topics too abruptly. Research on the development of auditory abilities shows that children of four, five, and even six years are still immature in their abilities to discriminate frequency and duration in human speech; they need slow, repetitive talk, with emphasis on word inflections. [13]
"You know," explained Dr. Janet Jensen, a prominent researcher in this field, "the way kindergarten teachers talk. Everyone makes jokes about it: 'Now -- children -- let's -- look -- at -- the -- bunny,' but they do that because the kids need and respond to it. Many children's programs, including Sesame Street, go much too fast for them." [14]
(Testimony to the fact that a children's program can follow sound development guidelines and still be enduringly popular comes from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, whose slow, repetitive speech and invitations to the child to respond appeals instinctively to preschoolers -- at least those whose sensibilities have not been dulled by raucous sideshows.)
Sesame Street also subordinates meaningful dialogue to brain-grabbing visual events, noises, and slapstick comedy. This emphasis is particularly troubling in view of the fact that both disadvantaged children and those with reading disabilities commonly show difficulty in using what are called "verbal strategies" for processing information. [15] This tendency to focus on the nonverbal aspects of a situation and disregard the language sets a child up for difficulty in school.
Although, to its credit, the program attempts to present both standard and nonstandard dialects and grammar, they too often appear in the form of poorly modeled and unclearly articulated parody. Sesame Street also sporadically attempts to teach vocabulary (e. g., names of ten baby animals in ninety seconds), but its format militates against sustained attention to the meaning of the grammar, sentences, or phrasal inflections that children will meet in books. And far too little effort is made to get the child to respond.
The few studies which suggest that Sesame Street teaches preschoolers to recognize a few more spoken vocabulary words provide very unconvincing evidence of overall language development. Although children who have watched Sesame Street get better at pointing to pictures in response to vocabulary words, [16] this type of recognition-level test cannot be taken to mean that the children can use the words in their own conversation. [17] Moreover, children in one study whose parents encouraged them to watch Sesame Street had the lowest overall vocabulary scores! [18]
No one has convincingly demonstrated that Sesame Street actually succeeds in its fundamental goal of helping young brains learn to crack the alphabetic code. Well-publicized early claims. that it had successfully taught disadvantaged children to recognize alphabet letters and numerals have subsequently been questioned on the basis that the money spent did not justify the small gains engendered. [19] Moreover, we now realize that empty word recognition is a meaningless exercise. Twenty years of throwing alphabet letters and dancing words at children is producing exactly what we might expect: students who, even after learning to read, lack the foundations for further progress; children who find reading "boring," who are satisfied with the superficial, who can't understand why meaning doesn't magically appear -- like a visual effect -- and who give up when it doesn't. The resulting failure and disenchantment are particularly tragic for those very children the program was primarily designed to serve.
3. How Does Print Behave?
The age of Sesame Street, optimistically crafted to narrow the chasms of disadvantage, has, in fact, seen those gaps widen. The facetious treatment of letters and other symbols gives children an erroneous idea of what to expect from the printed page. Words in books do not jump about, transform before one's eyes, or call attention to themselves. Children, particularly those disadvantaged by lack of experience with real books during the preschool years, are in for quite a shock when they get to school and discover that print stands still. No wonder they turn off when informed that they must bend their brains around the hard job of attacking the words, rather than having a barrage of letters, words, and pictures attacking them.
Even on the rare occasions when a real book slides through the cracks between Sesame Street's animation and agitation, the program may display only its illustrations (which, incidentally, tend to appear pallid and uninteresting by comparison to the program's vivid coloration). Thus, children miss one of their most important pieces of reading readiness, technically termed metalinguistic awareness, which is made up of knowledge that literate adults take for granted:
• understanding that letters make up words and that written words must be linked together into meaningful sentences
• knowing what a "word" is (i.e., that funny-looking bunch of squiggles with white space on all sides
• becoming familiar with the conventions of print (i.e., in English we read from left to right, observe punctuation marks, etc.)
• knowing firsthand the meaning of terms associated with books (i.e., "cover," "title," "author," "illustration," etc.)
Metalinguistic awareness is an important predictor of a child's success with early reading and is apt to be particularly deficient in Sesame Street's target audience. Youngsters may be totally bewildered in school if the teacher says, "Now, Johnny, try to read this word," and the child has never learned to differentiate between letter, word, and sentence. Many children without book experiences or writing experiences with drawing and scribbling can't visually locate word boundaries or consistently follow a line of print from left to right. These skills require slow, careful, firsthand exposure, and the program should be placing more emphasis on this sort of learning for children who do not have access to such experiences.
4. Bits vs. Big Bites of Meaning
Sesame Street viewers are exposed to lots of incidental knowledge, but adults who think this kind of information automatically makes them "smarter" are fooling themselves. Apparent precocity can be deceptive; if the child has not also integrated good reasoning skills along with the data, the early promise will soon fade. Indeed, one of the biggest problems of older students today is making connections. "There now exists a large body of research that clearly shows that children of all ability levels in Grades 4-12 have considerable difficulty in studying and linking together the concepts presented in science and social studies texts," states a report from the International Reading Association. [20]
"They have all these little bits of information, but they can't seem to see relationships, make inferences, or draw conclusions," say teachers from kindergarten to college. Difficulties with understanding sequence in text and writing logically reflect identical problems with linking thoughts together meaningfully.
All television programming is increasingly predicated on the idea that rapidly changing scenes keep viewers watching. "Watching thinking is boring and slow," says Neil Postman, who quotes Robert MacNeil of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on the fact that viewers are never required to pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time. "The idea is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement," said MacNeil. [21] Sesame Street has adopted the same format -- only with more noise and more vivid color.
Watching Sesame Street with an adult brain that struggles to make connections can be a very frustrating experience. The rapid, minute-by- minute alterations in context -- from a pirate ship to a city street, a barnyard to a cartoon of letter symbols -- defy sequence or logic and make it impossible to see relationships, understand the sequence of cause and effect, or keep a train of thought in motion. Such brain-training is directly antagonistic to the active and sustained work on connecting ideas that is needed to understand written text.
5. Listening vs. Looking
Why doesn't Sesame Street make a much greater effort to teach listening skills? Not only are its "graduates" deficient overall in ability to pay attention to and understand oral language, but they also lack the skills of auditory analysis that underlie mastery of "phonics."
Many in our growing ranks of poor readers (and spellers!) can't listen carefully enough to discriminate individual sounds in words or identify the order in which they come (e.g., "Here is a word: sun. Now tell me what sound you hear first in the word sun. Which sound do you hear last?"). As was mentioned in an earlier chapter, these skills of "phonologic awareness" are fundamental for reading and spelling.
Sesame Street purports to teach children "phonics," and its statement of educational goals includes such elements of phonological awareness as rhyming words (which, unfortunately, are too often presented unclearly and far too rapidly). [22] Its demanding visual format belies the claim, however, since "phonics," by definition, is an ear skill, not an eye skill. These auditory systems are in a period of critical development during the very preschool years when so many youngsters are watching the tube. Researchers agree that when given both visual displays and dialogue, children attend to and remember the visual, not the "talk." (Even for most adults, listening can't compete with looking if the brain is given the chance to do both at the same time.) Yet, as we saw in an earlier chapter, if auditory processing skills aren't embedded in the brain during the critical early years, it is much harder, if it is even possible, to insert them later.
Research also shows that children process the same information differently, depending on whether they look at it or listen to it. In one study, clear differences were found between children who had seen a televised folktale and those who heard the same dialogue read from a storybook. Those who had watched the story on television described the visual effects and what the characters did, whereas those in the read-aloud group described more dialogue of the story and gave significantly more information about the content of the text and the characters. [23]
What our children need is lots of good, slow, clear exposure to the sounds that will become their armamentarium for attacking language meaning as well as the written word. What a shame they are not getting it from this program!
6. Perceptual Organization vs. Perceptual Defense
One of the brain's major learning tasks is to organize the confusing array of sensory stimuli that start bombarding the infant at birth. For this, children need an environment over which they feel some control.
Researchers investigating the brain's "sensitive periods" report that the extent to which aspects of the inanimate environment change as a result of the child's actions has been found to relate to overall later intelligence and also to the ability to pursue a goal. [24] Unfortunately, viewing Sesame Street presents quite the opposite situation; the events are not only out of the child's control, but the noisy and visually violent nature of many episodes may cause sensory overload. [25]
The ability to organize a visual field is the entry point to reading. Children with poor skills of visual organization have difficulty, for example, in distinguishing word boundaries and keeping their place in the text. Yet, rather than encouraging children to develop perceptual organization, such programming may actually force them to practice habits of perceptual defense simply as a matter of neural self-protection. When even an adult brain has difficulty organizing confusing action, abrupt changes, and inexplicable deus ex machina visual effects, it should hardly be surprising if children become overwhelmed by the perceptual chaos.
There is no good evidence (although it has been suggested) that television can create serious, organic, perceptual problems. We need some studies looking at possible subtle effects of noisy, visually demanding programming on a normal child's perceptual (auditory and visual) organization skills. The "tuned-out" viewing behavior that many parents report may simply be the immature nervous system's defense against too much stimulation. How much exposure is needed to have an effect? No one knows, but different children have different thresholds at which they become overloaded.
7. Active vs. Passive Brains
Poor readers -- and poor problem-solvers in any domain -- tend to be passive; they give up if they don't immediately "get it." Such habits of incomprehension may be exacerbated by programs which teach a young child that seeking understanding is either superfluous or impossible. While research suggests that most children instinctively try to comprehend the content they see on TV, they are too often prevented from doing so by overly confusing program formats. When this experience is repeated frequently, they soon learn they are neither required nor expected to grasp what is going on.
Studies by experts not commissioned by the program are beginning to show that much of Sesame Street's content is incomprehensible to young children. Dr. Singer cites an example:
One of the programs in the series we studied involved an attempt on the part of the producers of Sesame Street to demonstrate the notion of deafness to children. A group of deaf children were introduced and they engaged in a series of activities, including suggesting letters through their body postures. Despite the production effort and undeniable sensitivity of the show (at least from the perspective of an adult), only 1 of the preschoolers in our sample of 60 who viewed this program grasped that the children on the screen could not hear. In effect thousands of dollars went into the production which failed completely to communicate its major message to the preschooler target-viewing audience. [26]
Most parents assume children understand Sesame Street much better than they actually do, reports Dr. Singer after studying youngsters' responses to the program. The reason, he says, "is that too often the children simply failed to follow the material being presented from one sequence to the next. The necessary time for mental replay was not allotted, and there was insufficient repetition." [27]
No one has determined what effects continued noncomprehension has on brain function, but research cited in the last chapter suggest it may cause it to retreat into alpha -- one of the "habits" we were warned about.
8. Good Readers Learn to Remember
Another related problem concerns children's ability to remember the meaning of what they read, a skill that requires, first, understanding the text, and second, use of active strategies for remembering it. Memory also demands mental perseverance, for it depends on maintaining information in what is called "working memory" long enough to "store" it in some sort of meaningful form, and "retrieve" it when needed. Passive brains retain sensations, not information.
Children who do not understand what they are seeing do not learn active memory strategies. Curiously, although Mister Rogers' Neighborhood does not rivet children to the set (research has shown they are much more inclined to walk and look around than during Sesame Street's sensorially demanding format), they actually remember more from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In this regard, reports Dr. Singer, those children who were less intelligent suffered more [i.e., remembered less] from exposure to Sesame Street, purportedly designed for the educationally disadvantaged [emphasis added]." [28]
9. Good Readers Can Pay Attention
While young children watch television, their attention tends to wander unless it is continually pulled back. Researchers who cite studies "proving" that children "pay attention" to TV are usually referring to this type of involuntary attention, which is quite different from the sort of voluntary attention needed to do well in school in general and reading in particular. Likewise, when you hear that children "actively" watch programs like Sesame Street, you should know that this really means that the viewer is frequently tuning out, looking away from the screen, playing, eating, or doing other things. The average look at the screen is actually less than five seconds in duration. [29] The truth is that the viewer may indeed be active, but the viewing is not.
Ideas in a text do not seize the reader's mind as do Ernie and Big Bird. Reading demands sustained voluntary attention from a mind that can hold a train of thought long enough to reflect on it, not one accustomed to having its attention jerked around every few seconds.
10. Who Makes the Pictures?
One of the most serious charges leveled against television viewing in general is that it robs children of the chance to learn to make pictures in their own minds. This critical skill is a cornerstone of good reading, not only because it keeps the reader connected to the text, but also as a very practical way to keep track of and remember what has been read. When poor readers -- and poor verbal problem-solvers -- hear (or read) words, they have trouble projecting anything on the screen of imagination.
Not long ago I visited an advanced-placement English class in a fast-track high school. The first act of Macbeth had been assigned to students as homework the previous evening; as they arrived in class the teacher asked them to write a description of what they had "seen" as they read. With a classful of good readers, I anticipated some colorful and dramatic accounts, and I was not disappointed. For a handful of students, however, this assignment proved frustrating.
"I read this over and over, but I guess I just don't see anything when I read," lamented one girl.
"That must make it hard to understand what you're reading," I ventured.
"It sure does," she confessed. "Maybe that's why I really hate reading -- but don't tell Mrs. --!"
Later the teacher drew me aside to tell me that the same students who didn't see the pictures were the ones she was most worried about. "I knew they weren't as good readers as the others," she said. "Now I think I know one reason why!"
Visual imagery also helps with solving math and science problems. "If Tom has three baskets of apples with twelve apples in each, and he divides each basketful evenly into four small boxes, how many boxes will he have and how many apples will each box contain?" Many people use some sort of visual image to "see" the baskets and boxes and to keep track of each step in the problem. Interestingly, students of the Sesame Street generation have particular difficulty with such "story problems." It seems that a combination of poor reading skill, lack of persistence, and inability to visualize contribute to this difficulty. While this skill seems to come more naturally to some brains than to others, it can be developed with practice. In a few studies, after children had been taught to make mental pictures, their reading scores went up. [30]
Sesame Street is constrained by its medium in teaching visual imagery. Yet, with some research already available, it should not be too difficult to come up with activities to give "mind pictures" much more emphasis than they now get. The longer children are habituated to this externally demanding visual format, the less likely they will probably be to generate their own scenarios.
Only a few studies have looked at television's interaction with more general aspects of imagination. They have found that children tend to provide longer and more imaginative endings to audio (radio) than to audiovisual (TV) stories. [31] There are also many anecdotal reports from veteran preschool teachers who began to report changes in children's imaginative play soon after the inception of Sesame Street. Their principal concern is that frequent viewers are more likely to mimic characters and action from programs than to make up scenarios of their own. Jerre Levy has reminded us that the systems linking language and visual imagery are forming throughout childhood, but no one knows if -- or when -- there is a critical period for imagination.
ISN'T THERE ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT SESAME STREET?
During a famine, even a sacred cow may be required to yield some nourishment. During the two years I have watched Sesame Street for the purposes of writing this chapter, I have noticed the genesis of some encouraging change. The pace is slowing just a bit, although not nearly enough. Expansion of content has also occurred in an effort to broaden both conceptual and "pro-social" (positive effects on behavior) learning. The program exposes children to some important concepts (songs about "Same, Different" as just one example). It has provided a happy familiarity with new heroes of cultural literacy such as Ernie and Big Bird. (And sold a lot of products, too.) Although its sense of humor has accurately been described by Dr. Lillian Katz as "too arch and much too sassy," children do get a kick out of the slapstick routines once they learn to adapt their brains to the noisy pace (a questionable benefit!). Personally, I find some of the plays on words terribly clever (e.g., "Placido Flamingo" sings with the animal orchestra), but then, I already know how to read and I happen to know who Placido Domingo is.
The program has made a serious effort to give positive messages about cultural diversity, handicaps, and major emotional issues such as those surrounding death [32] -- although, as we have seen, most of the message is missed by its young audience because of inappropriate modes of presentation. The material is arguably of better ethical quality than much other programming, and the statement of educational goals reflects current research (although it seems evident that they are poorly expressed in actual programming). If Sesame Street did not purport to be seriously educational, it might pass as clever and colorful light entertainment. But lauded as our major media effort to educate children, I believe it has failed and misled us at a time when we desperately need better models.
Children's Television Workshop has enjoyed a mandate to define good video "education" as well as appropriate academic methods and goals for preschoolers. They have not met their responsibility to provide sufficient summative research on their effects -- either positive or negative -- on learning. It can easily be argued that they have led an overly trusting public astray. The public, in turn, has been only too willing to cede them responsibility. And thus we reap the consequences.
One perceptive first-grader has summed up the situation quite neatly:
"It doesn't teach me much. It makes me laugh."
As a reading teacher, however, I'm not laughing.
CONCLUSION: TEACHING VS. SENSORY HUCKSTERISM
Reading is a complex intellectual act that cannot be peddled like an educational toy. The ability to read, and the related ability to write, are not hard-wired into the human brain. To make meaning out of printed text, the brain must be readied to think and to understand language; only then can it be trained to connect an internal mental life with written symbols that have no intrinsic meaning of their own. If reading is "sold" to unprepared children, they will soon discard it as worthless or uninteresting, because they lack the inner resources, both mental and physical, to bring life -- and meaning -- to the printed symbols.
Children immersed from birth in the spicy sensory bouillabaisse of visual immediacy will not become readers unless they have also soaked up the rich broth of language and reflection. Preschoolers who have been sold gimmicks in the name of learning and school-age children whose minds are habituated to the easy pleasures of viewing may well find the culture of the school an alien one. Their brains, shaped by visual novelty, may gradually lose the ability to bend themselves intelligently around the written word.
Who, then, will teach the next generation to read?