Should Children be Taught to Question Adult Authority? Keeping social learning on Sesamstrasse

Der, die, das [He, she, it]

wer, wie, was [who, how, what]

wieso, weshalb, warum [wherefore, for what reason, why]

wer nicht fragt, bleibt dumm! [Those who don’t ask, remain dumb!]

The song at the beginning of every German Sesamstrasse episode tells children to ask questions: if you don’t query the world, you won’t learn about it, is the message. To a modern audience, this idea perhaps isn’t very controversial. However, when the local German version of Sesame Street first appeared in 1973, this was a bold thing to tell preschool children, especially because it also entailed questioning adult authority and established norms. In fact, the idea of questioning traditional hierarchies between adults and children was so provocative to the Americans who owned the Sesame Street brand that they threatened to stop the production of the German version; only the lucrative nature of the financial arrangement with Sesamstrasse broadcast and merchandise made them look the other way.

When Sesame Street first aired in the United States in 1969, the American version aimed to teach preschoolers school-type skills and “appropriate” social behaviour. First and foremost, it focused on preparing its young audience better for school, particularly so-called “underprivileged” children. The show taught children to adapt to the established norms and values of American society and the educational system. To do so, Sesame Street portrayed an idealized version of the world, including an adult-child relationship with obedient children always ready to learn and listen to sensible adults.

Sesame Street’s production company, the Children’s Television Workshop, understood the show’s core ideas of childhood and education as ideal and culturally neutral—the show was to them “as culture free as tv can be.”[2] The belief in educational neutrality and the possibility for worldwide appeal of the show’s American pop culture elements meant the Workshop believed it could help all the world’s preschoolers learn school-type skills. But it also made the Workshop eye great opportunities for selling Sesame Street overseas. Reaching a global audience was a chance to create a business model in which international sales of broadcast and merchandise could finance domestic American production and research.

The American’s first attempt to attract international attention to their ideas of using television to teach school-type skills was an article published in the German journal Fernsehen und Bildung in 1968.[3] The Workshop also ensured that Sesame Street was screened at the children’s television festival, Prix Jeunesse International, in Munich in 1970, where the show won a prize.

German Sesamstrasse did, however, not become the first international co-production of Sesame Street. In 1970 the Workshop initiated a Spanish-language version for Latin America, Plaza Sesamo, to be produced in Mexico. The Americans closely controlled this production. They had secured much of the funding with a $ 1 million sponsorship from the American company Xerox and were heavily involved in the technical set-up. The heavy influence of the Workshop meant that Plaza Sesamo was very like the original English-language version.[4] This was not to be the case in West Germany.

When West German broadcasters with Norddeutscher Rundfunk in front initiated talks about a German version with the American Workshop, they agreed on a very different arrangement than the Latin American. Broadcasters in West Germany were more financially independent and technically advanced than the team producing Plaza Sesamo. However, the pedagogical divergence from the original American version of Sesame Street was what truly made the German co-production different.

Rejecting the American idea of education as something which could be objective and neutral, German broadcasters and local education experts discussed what pedagogical ideals they wanted to underpin a local German version of Sesame Street. They concluded that Sesamstrasse should promote “education to emancipation, social relationships to the environment of the target audience, and systematic exercises of social conduct.”[5] Social learning was to be foregrounded in the German version meaning it would dispense with the pleasantries in the American Sesame Street. Instead, it was to include issues that would teach children to venture out and explore the world, question what they didn’t understand, and make up their minds about things regardless that they would not always draw the same conclusions as adults.

For the first two seasons of Sesamestrasse, German-produced segments were mixed with American segments. Some German clips would teach letters or numbers, like in the American version. However, there were also films showing sibling rivalry, children fighting, defiant children, using slang, arguing, misbehaving, and questioning adults’ less-than-ideal behaviour and mindset. One film, for instance, showed a father helping a little girl pee in the street (because they couldn’t find a public toilet), a posh lady walking her dog would notice and be offended, but then immediately after asking her dog to defecate on the pavement and leave the poop on the ground, her hypocrisy evident to the child viewer. Another film showed two parents telling their daughter to ‘eat up’ before she went outside to play with her friends because, as the saying goes, ‘if you eat up, we’ll have good weather.’ However, as soon as the girl finished her soup, it started pouring outside the windows, showing that the parents were clearly wrong.

The reasons for including such scenes in the German version were related to broader pedagogical ideas at the time. The view of children’s opinions as valuable was part of a progressive, child-centred trend that had taken root in Western European pedagogical thought throughout the 1960s. In West Germany, the need for progressive education was also linked to new interpretations of the interwar period, in which authoritarian pedagogy was understood as a factor that had contributed to the rise of the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust.[6] Consequently, enabling children to question adult behaviour critically was part of a strategy to avoid repeating the past. The child-centred approach entailed taking children’s opinions and viewpoints seriously, seeing their interests as somewhat separate from those of their families and the school—ideas that also went hand in hand with the 1968 youth rebellion’s questioning of established values and power structures.

In the United States, ideas of progressive, child-centred pedagogy did not see a similar broad uptake in the mainstream educational system and mass media productions targeting children. Therefore, Sesame Street’s conventional concept of education did not meet much pushback in its domestic setting. The German ideas of social learning thus shocked the Workshop when it saw the first pilot episodes in 1972: this was not what the Americans had expected! In the American version of the show, children never questioned adults and were always on their best behaviour, ready to learn whatever adults wanted to teach.

The clash of pedagogical norms meant that the American producers of Sesame Street greatly disapproved of the German version. The Workshop believed the Germans had misunderstood its educational aims, not seeing the point of the social learning that Sesamstrasse introduced. The Workshop’s chief educational advisor thought the German segments were “arousing in the child emotions which he cannot yet understand or with which he cannot cope.” The Workshop advised that topics such as “questioning authority or deal[ing] with anger, jealousy, frustration, etc.” therefore had to be avoided.[7] It wanted them removed and all future segments produced in Germany to be preapproved. The locally produced segments for Sesamstrasse had ventured far from what was seen as ideal television for preschoolers.

The fight over social learning and its place on German Sesamstrasse continued for the first two seasons. However, the technical independence of the German set-up and the fact that the Workshop desperately needed money from the German broadcast and merchandise deals gave Sesamstrasse’s producers the freedom not to follow the Workshop’s directives. A broader European interest in how the German production turned out also put extra pressure on the Workshop to make the collaboration successful, as it badly wanted to make new co-productions.

In the end, the popularity of Sesamstrasse in West Germany and the financial pressure experienced by the Workshop meant a compromise was reached with the new production set-up introduced in Sesamstrasse season III. German-produced street scenes and new local Muppets meant that the Workshop’s general ideas of television production were more prominent in the production, but also that the local feel of the show was boosted—even if the social learning goals that had first been conceived as all-encompassing were reduced to a neat checklist.

REFERENCES

[1] Unless other sources are referenced, findings discussed in this blog post refer to chapters 1 and 4 in Helle Strandgaard Jensen, Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press 2023).

[2] “RAI introduces ‘Sesamo Apriti’ an Italian Language adaptation.” July 1977, 1. University of Maryland, Hornbake Library Special Collections, Children’s Television Workshop, Series 12, subseries 3, box 369 (CTW, print catalogue, 2014), folder 12. See also Jensen, Sesame Street, “Introduction,” p. 1-2.

[3] Joan Ganz Cooney, “Der Children’s Television Workshop,” Fernsehen Und Bildung 2, no. 3/4 (1968): 156–58.

[4] Heather Hendershot, “Sesame Street: Cognition and Communications Imperialism,” in Kids Media Culture edited by Marsha Kinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 137-176.

[5] Klamroth to Cooney, October 18, 1971. University of Maryland, Hornbake Library Special Collections, Children’s Television Workshop, Series 12, subseries 3, box 369 (print catalogue), folders 1 and 3.

[6] Sonja Levsen, Autorität und Demokratie: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Erziehungswandels in Westdeutschland und Frankreich, 1945–1975 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019), 441–556; Sonja Levsen, “Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and West Germany, 1945–1968,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 812–50, https://doi.org/10.1086/694614.

[7] Wright to Grossmann, April 21, 1972. Wright is referencing to advisor Gerald Lesser’s opinions throughout the letter. University of Maryland, Hornbake Library, Children’s Television Workshop, series 12, subseries 3, box 365, folder 6 (print catalog).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Helle Strandgaard Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford University Press, 2023) and From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood (John Benjamins, 2017). She holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and has been a visiting fellow at universities in the UK, the US, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. Her work has appeared in Media History; Journal of Children and Media; Media, Culture & Society; Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth; The Programming Historian, and elsewhere. She holds a shared directorship at the Center for Digital History Aarhus. She lives in Åbyhøj, Denmark, and her favourite time is spent cooking, reading, and playing video games with her family.