Lessons From the Street

America’s most successful children’s education show is still hitting all the right notes. This past Wednesday, just after the president’s health-care address, the 1-2-3 Gang hosted a candid conversation on PBS about job loss, housing woes, personal responsibility, and the importance of family and community. The message was wonderfully uplifting and unclouded: With honest hard work and each other’s help, we can get back to those sunny days.

This is a great show for the whole country, not merely the duck-duck-goose and Dunkaroo demographic.

As comical as it may sound, Sesame Street has long been a showcase of the best ideals of American liberalism. For 40 years, it’s promoted a vision of our better angels—albeit wrapped up in red and blue monster fur. The focus of the show has always been education through real-world experience, the value of inclusive community, and the wonders of ordinary life. And the lessons haven’t just been for wee babes: Although the messages of Big Bird and Grover may be articulated in terms a child could understand, they are nonetheless refreshingly relevant for the older generation.

Wednesday’s primetime special “Families Stand Together: Feeling Secure In Tough Times,” was an especially apt example of how Sesame Street offers both a message to children and the chance for adults to take a step back and reassess our thinking. Hosted by Al Roker, Deborah Roberts, and financial expert Jean Chatzky, the episode presented practical suggestions to families on how to discuss financial woes with children and weather the economic storm. It also emphasized that this country must face the current crisis with some sense of mutual cooperation.

In the opening scenes of the show, Elmo’s mother loses her job and has to explain to Elmo—in a slow, Southern drawl—why she’ll be at home more often. After a series of questions by Elmo—Is it Elmo’s fault? Did Elmo buy too many toys? Will Elmo have to move?—the characters travel around the neighborhood to learn lessons from four real families dealing with similar changes.

Along the way, Elmo’s family learns about the perils of instant gratification, the difference between needs and wants, and why Mommy and Daddy need to say no: Elmo can’t have everything Elmo wants, the family needs Elmo’s help. Above all, Elmo learns the importance of talking things out with Elmo’s mother and father.

In between Elmo’s adventures, Al Roker and Deborah Roberts discuss financial matters with real-life families facing difficulties. In a very lucid fashion, the lives of Sesame Street’s adult residents run right alongside the present problems of Wall Street and Main Street. Some of the families featured on the show face not only economic stress, but also what amounts to disillusionment with the American dream. The adults are generally more distraught and more in need of advice than the kids—which is why, once again, this show is for everyone.

What Sesame Street offers to stressed parents is a discussion on how to get help. There are extended conversations about getting loans, short-selling property, finding daycare, and advertising skills. There’s also frank talk about why the current crisis is occurring and a promotion of the idea that many families from many different backgrounds are struggling. Parents shouldn’t beat themselves up too much—in fact, there are many things folks can cooperate on to help each other out.

For example, the show’s opening scene features just such a positive, practical idea: a community market. As Elmo shops around for odds and ends on the street, Al Roker explains to Elmo that a community market is just “neighbors coming together to buy and sell things” and “make some extra money.” In a later scene—and a symbolic slice of the show’s spirit—one of the neighborhood youths explains to Grover that despite the ambiguity of the phrase, one can’t buy “community” at the “community market.” In fact, he goes on to explain, community can’t be bought at all. Just like family, community is priceless no matter what happens with banks, jobs, or the government.

On Sesame Street, this resounding theme of inclusive community, although empathetic, is not part of an over-idealistic naivete of which the show is too often accused. Although the program has some fanciful overtones—as any children’s program should—the challenges of Sesame Streets are honest and real.

The show promotes the idea of working together in the context of a very un-ideal environment. Although Sesame Street has many delightful characters, over the years its denizens have faced tough challenges—poverty, family separation, intercultural anxiety, and even urban blight. The show’s message that folks can voluntarily work together despite their differences, and sometimes through their differences, to promote the general welfare is not overly idealistic—it is a profound piece of the American historical narrative.


Raúl A. Carrillo ’10 is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.