An Interesting Article

[Drtooth]

Actually Sesame Street has always been under attack, from the very beginning. There was a book from the 1980's, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's a great book, but the author was concerned that Sesame Street was promoting too much of an instant reward system for learning. How could kids pay attention in school when there's no puppets or music to reward them for learning? He wasn't really against Sesame Street itself, just skeptical as to whether Television as a medium was a realistic or effective learning tool.

Yeah! Why would ANYONE prefer a loving giant yellow bird and his wonderful friends using magic and mayhem to old hags that yell at you everytime you draw the letter A slightly wrong or coloring outside the lines? Seriously, remember that episode of the Simpsons where Bart goes to Kindergarten and the teacher seems to single him out and make him feel terrible? That was like 90% my grade school experience.

On the one hand, sure... there's no competing with television and what it can do, but on the other hand, our education system is screwed up, even in the "good" old days. But on the first hand again, it's human nature to want to be fascinated and entertained. You remember funny or strange facts more than the things you have to know... and I mean, EVERYONE loves science when things blow up and chemicals change colors, but no one likes calculating chemical change formulas. I learned more science from Beakman and Bill Nye than my science teachers. I liked the lab studies, but I HATED lab summary writing. Seriously, I almost would have gone into science if I didn't hate math so much. Plus, you can't invent anything fun in reality.

But the author of that specific book criticizes something that has a point. He's calling out the love affair with media, questioning things. The guy who;'s writing the OTHER book is just throwing more pundit oily rags on an exploding fire of polarization. Upper class conservatives will laugh it up, lower class ones might actually take it seriously, and imagine some random conspiracy.

 

[CensoredAlso]

Yeah! Why would ANYONE prefer a loving giant yellow bird and his wonderful friends using magic and mayhem to old hags that yell at you everytime you draw the letter A slightly wrong or coloring outside the lines?

Lol, exactly. Well I guess the author's concern was that learning can't always be easy and fun, especially when you get older, and kids can't always expect an instant reward. Though personally I don't recall comparing school to Sesame Street that way as a kid.

But the author of that specific book criticizes something that has a point. He's calling out the love affair with media, questioning things. The guy who;'s writing the OTHER book is just throwing more pundit oily rags on an exploding fire of polarization.

Good point, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a sharp analysis of the media as a whole, Sesame Street was just one chapter. I can't even imagine what the author would have thought of the Internet! (Sadly, he's since passed on).

Whereas that recent article about Sesame Street is pretty obviously politically motivated.

 

[Drtooth]

Lol, exactly. Well I guess the author's concern was that learning can't always be easy and fun, especially when you get older, and kids can't always expect an instant reward. Though personally I don't recall comparing school to Sesame Street that way as a kid.

Well, lemme just put it this way... Big Bird doesn't give you a test at the end of your show that counts for 60% of your final grade. So there are 2 points made for and against. Learning isn't necessarily fun, but in a sense it also doesn't have to drive kids crazy and create such painful stress.

But the other book that this thread is all about... seriously, I tend to think it as bad as those segregationists that vilified Sesame Street for having a diverse neighborhood. Just speaking out for something terrible, at the expense of the work of people who have nothing but love in their hearts.

 

[CensoredAlso]

But the other book that this thread is all about... seriously, I tend to think it as bad as those segregationists that vilified Sesame Street for having a diverse neighborhood. Just speaking out for something terrible, at the expense of the work of people who have nothing but love in their hearts.

Well the one difference is that the segregationists were acting out of ignorance and fear. The people villifying Sesame Street and PBS nowadays are acting out of greed.

 

[D'Snowth]

Again, I must state Ben Shapiro is NO better than the warmongering Middle Eastern dictators that whine about how Sesame Street is imperialistic because they teach kids not to go around killing each other. And really, when has Peace and Pacifism become such a disgustingly perverted concept?

Well, there's this quote from Bin Laden himself...

"We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

 

[The Shoe Fairy]

Well, there's this quote from Bin Laden himself...

"We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

The US loving life? With the US health system? With the largest military spendings of any nation?

The term "We" is also subjective in this instance.
That quote is far too open to be easily discussed, I'll give it that.

 

[Drtooth]

Well the one difference is that the segregationists were acting out of ignorance and fear. The people villifying Sesame Street and PBS nowadays are acting out of greed.

More fear than greed... but the guy wants to sell books... so greed surely has to add into the equation.

The US loving life? With the US health system? With the largest military spendings of any nation?

The term "We" is also subjective in this instance.
That quote is far too open to be easily discussed, I'll give it that.

Yeah, but we don't train our 3 year olds to use machine guns and uzis. it is too opnely discussed, but if anything else, our kids are treated like kids, and not the next generation of hateful mindless zombies. That happens in teenagerhood when they play Call of Duty.

 

[CensoredAlso]

"We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

I suppose he was referring to how he and his followers were willing to end their own lives in order to get their "reward" in the after life. And I think that's probably the most tragic thing about these terrorists. They're so brainwashed that they're willing to destroy their own lives as well as others. They're no different from those suicide cults really.

And hey Christianity has its martyrs of course, people who sacrifice their lives for their religion. But in those cases, that choice was often forced upon them due to oppression, not out of some need for revenge, or domination, or the promise of "reward." Plus they didn't take others with them...

 

[The Shoe Fairy]

I suppose even that plays into where you draw the line between cult and religion, I know plenty of people that would say Mormonism is a cult, rather than a religion.
I don't really want to start a theistic debate though.

Drtooth, I think in 10 years time with the way unmanned drone strikes are going, war will become a day at the office, with a joystick, putting it all a little bit too close to Call of Duty. On the note about guns and kids though, there's now a push here in Australia (which has tight gun laws) to making shooting a competitive school sport for all schools. Now that's arguable.

 

[CensoredAlso]

On the note about guns and kids though, there's now a push here in Australia (which has tight gun laws) to making shooting a competitive school sport for all schools. Now that's arguable.

Well shooting is a legitimate sport that doesn't automatically equal violence. I don't mind that, as long as the students in such a club were deemed to be mature enough to be there, heh.