Sesame Street Is the Fast Lane of Education

Sesame Street is the single most important show on television. Seasame Street first aired on November 10, 1969. Over the decades, the producers of the show have fine-tuned the process of education through entertainment and have made Sesame Street the standard in children’s educational entertainment.

The key to Sesame Street’s effectiveness is the show’s energetic format. Sesame Street takes the essence of early learning (colors, shapes, numbers, letters, etc.) and integrates them into fun, interesting, and quick segments. For example, Big Bird and Ernie may discuss the letter D, and then Ernie will flashback to a song he sang to Bert about the letter D. Elmo may tell Cookie Monster that his favorite number is 5, and then a quick music video about the number 5 will play. Many of these segments last just a few minutes (often less than a minute); however, the producers have managed to weave the segments together to create one seamless episode after another.

Parents who watch Sesame Street with their children on a regular basis will recognize many of the songs and skits that appear throughout almost every episode. Sesame Street has amassed such a tremendous library of material that the producers can pull from dozens of classic segments for almost any subject. Even though some of these segments go back decades, they still manage to be relevant. The reason why they are relevant is because the basics of learning have not changed, and young children today are a lot like young children were decades ago.

In the world of media, there are hundreds of examples of important programming; however, not one of them does as much to introduce small children to learning as Sesame Street. There is no more valuable hour of programming on television.