One of the most vivid memories from my childhood
comes from my pre-K classroom, just before we were let out for the afternoon.
Our teacher would put on each day’s episode of Sesame Street. With
the help of Oscar the Grouch, Grover, and Big Bird, our teacher led the
class in the episode’s counting exercises and alphabet lessons; we sat tight
during the program’s mini-documentaries that showed us processes like how apple
juice was bottled. Class always ended after the closing credits, during which
every student danced while our parents waited outside the classroom.
This memory is probably no different from the
memories of hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of preschoolers around the
world. The impact of Sesame Street on the lives of children is
undeniable—and maybe even more profound than we realized.
According to the Washington Post, a new paper by University of
Maryland’s Melissa Kearney and Wellesley College’s Philip Levine finds that
students who watch Sesame Street on a regular basis are more
likely to keep up with their grade level. The effects of the show were most
pronounced in boys from black and other disadvantaged communities.
After Sesame Street was introduced,
children living in places where the show was broadcast saw a 14 percent drop in
their likelihood of being behind in school. Levine and Kearney note in their
paper that a wide body of previous research has found that Head Start, the
pre-kindergarten program for low-income Americans, delivers a similar benefit.
However, that doesn’t mean Sesame Street should be
used as a substitute for education. Levine and Kearney argue that TV should
only act as a supplement to the classroom, as Head Start offers “family
support, medical and dental services, and development of emotional skills that
help kids in social settings.”
What Levine and Kearney found, though, was a rather
intriguing equivalency between the lessons of Sesame Street and MOOCs, or
“massive open online-courses,” a recent trend in accessible higher education.
“If we can do this with Sesame Street on television,” Levine and Kearney write,
“we can potentially do this with all sorts of electronic communications.”
Such a development could result in massive changes
in access for lower-income Americans unable afford a university education.
What’s stopping us from bridging the gap between the elementary benefits of
Sesame Street and higher ed—from secondary school through college?
Levine and Kearney credit the show’s effectiveness to its use of storytelling—or
as they put it, “power of the human narrative.” Indeed, storytelling can
communicate experience in a way that many people can find relatable, making it
easier to commit subjects like math, science, and language to memory; this
allows the student to better understand and internalize concepts at any age.
Of course, the biggest benefit of this theory is
that it offers one possible solution to educational inequality.
While researchers argue the effect fades before high
school graduation, I attribute this to the fact that between elementary school
and college, there’s no supplemental education quite like Sesame Street.
But introducing such an approach to students in underserved communities could
benefit those enrolled in secondary education the same way the program does in
elementary school.
Many schools are already adopting project-based
learning (PBL) approaches, which apply real life situations to academic
curricula in order to better engage students. The method hinges on the idea
that education should focus on developing skills like problem-solving,
teamwork, and critical thinking, rather than stale memorization that students
will forget in a matter of days. Instead of “teaching for the test,” PBL
schools “teach for life.”
One San Diego charter school, High Tech High, the
subject of an upcoming documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, is
completely devoted to this approach. According to the school’s website, High
Tech High’s 13 schools are comprised of 5,000 students spanning K-12 grades, 60
percent are students of color, and 42 percent qualify for reduced lunch—but a
staggering 98 percent of the school’s graduates go on to college.
PBL isn’t necessarily geared toward STEM fields, as only 34
percent of students go in that direction, but the skills developed in the
process supply students with the tools to enter creative fields that are more
consistent with modern jobs.
Most Likely to Succeed Trailer from One Potato Productions on Vimeo.
PBL works to reach students who are most likely to
drop out due to loss of interest from traditional, passive educational
practices.
But most adults, college-aged or older, likely don’t
have access to project-based learning, so how can the increasingly ubiquitous
advent of MOOCs function as an answer to American educational woes?
As you can guess, the current completion rate of the
average MOOC is just under 10 percent. This statistic shows that online
courses can’t compete with the impact of a full college experience, which
includes actual contact with your professor (or TA depending on the size of the
class) and a support system with your peers. In contrast, learning from behind
a computer screen can be very isolating.
MOOCs aren’t perfect, but like Sesame Street and
other educational programming, they are a form of education that’s reaching
students by way ofmass
technology. Mode of transmission for Sesame Street is
through public television, whereas MOOCs are available via the Internet. Many
are free to join, while others allow digital learners can pay tuition after
the completion of the course. (So if you do poorly, you don’t have to take
the credit.)
What’s missing from MOOCs, however, explains why
they aren’t as successful: They are missing the human element, the
aforementioned power of storytelling.
Storytelling provides that cognitive association
your brain needs to engage with educational content, the thing that makes
something worth remembering or hard to forget.
But really, it shouldn’t be about simple
memorization. While fields require some level of memorization—I definitely do
not want to be injected by a doctor or nurse who didn’t learn their medical
terminology—it shouldn’t be the entire means of mastering a field. Doctors and
nurses need to know countless facts, figures, and measurements, but they also
need to learn problem solve and think on their feet. That’s why medical school
and nursing school both require significant real-world experience.
Education must be applicable to life to be
successful; they understand this over at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that
produces Sesame Street. Education must also be accessible,
which would require significant restructuring of the educational system. It’s a
pipe dream, I’m sure, but according to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich,
that pipe dream is imperative to the future of not only our students, but the
U.S. economy itself. Reich insists we need to “get back to a curriculum that
builds curiosity, problem solving, teamwork, and perseverance.”
Sesame Street has
nailed that approach since the 1970s, whether it’s teaching kids to count or
teaching them about virtues like restraint (Cookie Monster’s there for a
reason!). Now it’s time to bring that approach to kids who are too cool for
school because, frankly, school is a drag. The secret is it that doesn’t have
to be.
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