Thinking Too Hard About Big Bird

With Sesame Street now online, here is John Holt's 1971 article on Sesame Street from The Atlantic's archives (which are now free along with the rest of the magazine). Holt argued that the show's teaching methods could be improved upon:

...teaching children to count is not a good way to introduce them to the world of numbers. It leads many of them to think that numbers are a kind of procession of mythical figures, dwarfs maybe, always walking in the same order, the first named One, the next Two, and so on. Even if they have been “taught” to “count” a group of objects by touching them in order, saying “one, two, three," they may not realize that the number is a way of talking about the quantity of objects before them. Later, they may think of all arithmetic as a set of complicated and mysterious ritual dances done by these number dwarfs, without rhyme or reason or connection with anything else. Much on Sesame Street would encourage such fancies. More often than not, numbers appear on the screen only as numerals, with nothing to show the quantities they represent.