When Sesame Street arrived, scientists were just discovering that our brains were not fully formed at birth and could be affected by early experiences. Head Start began in 1965, in part, out of that revelation. “Educators were virtually ignoring the intellect of preschool children,” says Joan Ganz Cooney, who threw that dinner party and has been the show’s visionary since the beginning. Children would eat up the ABCs before kindergarten, Cooney believed, especially if a wacky puppet ate up alphabet-shaped cookies along with them. The Department of Education was sceptical. But the government agreed to contribute half of the original $8 million budget to launch Sesame Street.

The results were pretty immediate. The first season in 1969 set out to teach children to count from one to 10, but it became clear that kids as young as 2 could make it to 20. (The show now hits 100, counting by tens.) That rookie year also yielded three Emmys, a Peabody Award, a front-page rave from The New York Times and one especially noteworthy piece of fan mail from Richard Nixon.

The most impressive feedback, however, came from the kids themselves—or at least from their test scores. No show to this day has probed its effects on kids as thoroughly as Sesame Street, which plans to spend more than $770,000 in 2009 on its department of education and research. When people think of Sesame Street as the essence of educational television, what they don’t realise is how much the show has educated the educators. Independent research found that children who regularly watch Sesame Street gained more than nonviewers on tests of letter and number recognition, vocabulary and early math skills.

... contd.