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Several factors determine what constitutes appropriate children’s culture. These depend on how a given society views childhood and the role of the media in their lives, which fluctuate with changing political and cultural tides—and can vary from place to place.Fundamental disagreement among virtue collaborators in retrospective of Sesame Street First adapted for West German television audiences in the early 1970s, this film can help us understand many of today’s heated debates about children and the media.
When the American version of Sesame Street first aired in the United States in 1969, its goal was to be an educational alternative to commercial television. It focuses on preparing young audiences — especially “underprivileged” children — for school by using traditional rote-and-test educational methods. It teaches numbers and the alphabet in a fun way with the help of Jim Henson Muppets. Because of the diversity of the cast, outreach work and urban settings, “Sesame Street” has always been viewed as liberal In the U.S.
Culturally, Sesame Street portrays idealized world, including developing adult-child relationships with well-behaved children who are willing to listen to wise adults.show Prepare to help American children adapt to existing norms in society, especially the norms of the education system, so that they are better off later in life.
Children’s Television Workshop, the production company, described the show’s core philosophy about childhood and education as “non-cultural” – not espousing any political and cultural values or promoting a particular worldview. Believing that all children would benefit from its unbiased approach to education, it eyed opportunities to sell “Sesame Street” overseas. “We’re like the British Empire. One day the sun never sets on Sesame Street,” the company’s first president, Joan Ganz Cooney, said in 1971. Reaching a global audience is an opportunity to create a business model where international sales of broadcasts and merchandise can fund domestic production and research. The show comes in its original English version and a slight localization of the content can be added by a local producer version for sale.
After the program aired in the United States, it began to pursue the global market. West Germany was one of the most lucrative and influential markets at the time and was a prime target for children’s television studios as early as 1970. But selling “Sesame Street” to West Germany proved challenging because West German society placed such a premium on different ideas about education and children’s relationship with adults.
In Germany in the 1960s, the experience of World War II had a major impact on educational culture. To avoid a repeat of the horrors of war and the Holocaust, educators and politicians across the political spectrum are advocating a new, less authoritarian approach to education. Educators and public intellectuals argue that children should learn how to stand up for themselves and how to criticize parents and other adult authorities. Education must be more explicit about freedom and equality, teaching children to be critical of oppressive structures in private and public spaces.
In an effort to empower children’s television, West German producers hope their version of “Sesame Street” will teach children to take risks and explore the world on their own. They want children to have the ability to question what they don’t understand and to make decisions about things—even if it means children come to different conclusions than adults.
To this end, the German “Sesamstrasse” mixed snippets of American episodes with locally produced vignettes. Unlike the American version, it focuses on social education. During the first two seasons, segments included storylines about sibling rivalry, children fighting, provoking children, children using slang, bickering, misbehaving and explicitly questioning the less than ideal behaviors and mindsets of adults.
A 1973 vignette depicts a girl being ignored by adults in a store. After being ignored or actively pushed away by adult shoppers multiple times, the girl went behind the counter and took what she needed. When the clerk asked what she was doing, the girl simply asked the price of the bread, paid and left, saying, “It’s the children’s turn too!”
Many locally produced centerfolds take children’s perspectives seriously and encourage them to do it themselves. This child-centered content is supposed to empower children to critically question adult behavior and create a freer and more equal society for the immediate benefit of all children.
This vision clashed with the teaching style of the American “Sesame Street” and caused tension between its creators and their German collaborators. In 1972, an official letter from the American creator to his German counterpart expressed concern about the German insertions’ “handling of topics that questioned authority” because they “clearly encouraged[d] Watch children question and flout the rules and restrictions imposed by adults. “
Likewise, Gerald Lesser, chief education consultant for Children’s Television Studios in the United States, believes that the German-language segment “evokes in the child emotions that he cannot yet understand or cope with.” Lesser felt that a child-centred approach was “completely antithetical to” the mission of the workshop.He therefore suggests such things as “questioning authority or trading[ing] With anger, jealousy, frustration, etc. ” to be avoided in future German productions.
The struggle over social learning and its place in Germany’s “Sesamstrasse” continued in the first two seasons. However, the technical independence of the German establishment and the fact that children’s television studios desperately needed funding from German broadcasting and merchandise deals gave the producers of “Sesamstrasse” the freedom not to follow all the directives of their American counterparts.
Tensions over the content of ‘Sesamstrasse’ demonstrate how ideas about what constitutes child-appropriate media content vary according to the history of societies and the roles they create for their youngest residents. Two examples from Sesame Street are very Different spaces help us understand this divide.
Americans focus on achieving equal opportunity and strive to improve children’s educational performance. In this way, Sesame Street encourages children to fit in with existing educational systems, social norms, and power hierarchies of children and adults. Producers see children as a journey into adulthood rather than individuals with valuable perspectives and experiences, and thus create television content that only sees young viewers as students. In Germany, the same show treats children as citizens.
The international history of Sesame Street tells us that nothing is “culture neutral.” The material that claims to be best for children depends on the social and political ideals we hold dear at a given moment in a given society. This means that when we discuss what content is appropriate for children, we are also discussing what norms and values we want to pass on to new generations.
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