Lloyd Morrisett, co-creator of “Sesame Street”, is dead. The US psychologist wanted to put his theories into practice.
“I was raised to believe that being a professor was the best job in the world,” Lloyd Morrisett once said. In fact, he was well on his way to a career as a scientist when he became painfully aware of a discrepancy between what he was doing and what he wanted to achieve. He had a PhD from Yale in the field of experimental psychology, with a focus on learning and education. How might one improve the opportunities for children from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, he asked himself. How to create early access to learning? Morrisett was successful in researching principles and methods, but was frustrated: Because the experiments, although effective, only reached a few children.
When he noticed how well his then three-year-old daughter memorized commercials on television, an idea was born. Couldn’t you pick that up, copy elements? The foundation for “the great experiment that we know as Sesame Street” (according to one chronicler) was laid. In 1969, together with a TV producer, Morrisett created the American original of the series that would become the world’s best-known children’s show: “Sesame Street”.
She came to Germany 50 years ago, where a critic first described her as a “slum customer from the bucket”. The originals were replaced by in-house productions, casual learning was the concept here and there. By explaining letters to Kermit that the Cookie Monster ate behind his back. Characters showed that fruit is healthy and that friendship is important. And with the help of small clips that conveyed interesting facts. Television as a broadly effective educational motor: it hasn’t quite fulfilled the great promise that the psychologist saw in it. Morrisett died at the age of 93.
