On Feb. 26, professor Michael Dawson delivered the lecture ‘“Not even the animals die”: Canadians Confront Sesame Street, 1969-1979’ at St. Thomas University.
Sesame Street, the show that got the spotlight during this lecture as it did throughout the 1970s, originally tried to provide an educational head start to disadvantaged children.
Because of the show’s success drawing in audiences, it soon became the center of numerous critics that attacked it’s narrow educational focus, its emphasis on cognitive rather than social skills and its Americanization of children’s reality.
Dawson, who is an enthusiast of looking at history through a popular culture lens, said he became curious about whether there was a history of education linked to muppets.
“So I was interested in, when Sesame Street hits the airwaves, what are people saying about the Muppet characters? Like, how central are they to the learning and entertainment focus? And are there any controversies about this?”
This curiosity led him to find that muppets were one of the most important aspects of Sesame Street because they were what kept children focused on the numeracy and literacy lessons.
“What was interesting there was that even on The Muppet Show, you could see Jim Henson, who created the Muppets and others, finding ways to shape and influence young minds.”
Some critics claimed that they wanted “lessons that focused on empowering children,” so that the children would be the center of the lesson instead of staying in the periphery, trying to figure out the right answer to please the adult.
“The kind of parallel that I saw with the Muppet Show was that I felt empowered,” said Dawson.
“For me, the muppets, whether they were on The Muppet Show or on Sesame Street, there was always a learning element to it, a socialization element to it for kids and that’s what kind of got me interested in the project.”
He said that this historical research on T.V. may be relevant to explain some circumstances currently happening in Canada.
“We’ve got a pattern in terms of Americanization and concerns about Canadian broadcasting. There is a historical dimension to moral panics about what children are watching on T.V.”
Dawson mentioned that the more people are immersed in history and its cultural significance, the easier it becomes to understand and empathize with their lives.
With this lecture, Dawson highlighted for attendees the idea of contemporary anti-Americanism, by going back in time and exploring how the concerns about Americanization have a long-standing history in Canada.
This event was part of the STU Public Lecture Series, which enables STU faculty researchers to present ideas and research results to a wide and diverse audience on issues of broad public interest.
As a historian, he said that the most he can hope for is to spread his work through publishing, press or academia.
He said that historians usually only look backwards, while people more focused on policy, like sociologists or political scientists, are the ones to work on the future.
“Ideally over time, the findings might filter down and then shape the opinion of somebody who’s actually at the levers of power that they can do it. Historians just are not really trained to do that.”
