ABSTRACT
We are, as always, in the midst of a literacy crisis. Like business cycles and bear markets, one comes along at more or less frequent intervals, at least every ten or twenty years. The last major crisis that I can recall vividly announced its arrival on the cover of Newsweek in the 1970s under the headline “Why Johnny can't Write.” Few questioned the validity of the claim and few doubted the causes: the chief culprit, most pundits agreed, was television. As Rose Goldsen's (1977) sociological study The Show and Tell Machine argued, television is capable of teaching many things—especially the rituals of consumption. It fails, however, to teach literacy, even when literacy education figures prominently in a program's stated goals, as it does in most educational programming for children. In fact, in her analysis of Sesame Street, perhaps the world's most popular children's show, Goldsen argues not that its efforts to teach literacy are a failure but that the program's representational style and its content actively discourage reading. Each day one Muppet or another offers to sell young viewers an “O” and each day's program “is brought to you by” (that is, sponsored by) two or three letters and numbers. Under the guise of teaching letter-recognition and number concepts, each installment actually instructs children in the art of understanding television commercials.
