What Can Technologists Learn from Sesame Street? with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio

June 22, 2023

What happens when creators consider what lifelong human development looks like in terms of the tools we make? And what philosophies from Sesame Street can inform how to steward the power of AI and social media to influence minds in thoughtful, humane directions?

When the first episode of Sesame Street aired on PBS in 1969, it was unlike anything that had been on television before - a collaboration between educators, child psychologists, comedy writers and puppeteers - all working together to do something that had never been done before: create educational content for children on television.

Fast-forward to the ˮ��: could we switch gears to reprogram today’s digital tools to humanely educate the next generation?

That’s the question Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin explore with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, the Senior Vice President of Curriculum and Content for the Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street.

Major Takeaways

Sesame Street defies media norms with its unique approach to childhood development and psychology in the context of television. When comedy writers, musicians, and puppeteers join forces with experts in developmental psychology and other fields, it’s possible to create meaningful educational content for children.
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When Sesame Street debuted in 1969, television was a “vast wasteland.” Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Street founder and visionary, observed children learning through commercial jingles. That inspired a curriculum-driven model of creating impactful and relevant content for children and the adults in their lives, and it’s still in use today.
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It is possible to create normative content for children around the world, regardless of culture or geography. Sesame Street is grounded in the learning sciences, which keeps the show focused on what is normative worldwide. Math, science, empathy, and understanding emotions are universal concepts. There's more universality than there is specificity on Sesame Street, and content is localized so that the characters and settings resonate through the appropriate cultural lens.
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We can apply Sesame Street’s design values to technologies like AI and social media. The care and thought that go into Sesame Street starkly contrasts with the reckless deployment of AI in products children access, like Snap’s My AI chatbot. We can leverage Sesame Workshop’s hard-won lessons about responsible developmental media and education so that we can co-create a media environment in which children - and all of society - can thrive.

Recommended Media

This documentary offers a rare window into the early days of Sesame Street, revealing the creators, artists, writers and educators who together established one of the most influential and enduring children’s programs in television history

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Rosemarie shares all the research-based, curriculum-directed school readiness skills that have made Sesame Street the preeminent children's TV program

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This volume serves as a marker of the significant role that Sesame Street plays in the education and socialization of young children

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In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and 1950s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember

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Neil Postman’s groundbreaking book about the damaging effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century

Explore parents’ and educators’ perceptions of children’s social identity development

Commissioned by Sesame Workshop, the study was led by University of Wisconsin researchers Marie-Louise Mares and Zhongdang Pan

According to the survey titled, “K is for Kind: A National Survey On Kindness and Kids,” parents and teachers in the United States worry that their children are living in an unkind world

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