Former Sesame Workshop President and CEO Jeffrey D. Dunn reflects on the significance of The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education for “The Blueprint Outlasted the Medium,“ a new series marking the 60th anniversary of Joan Ganz Cooney’s landmark 1966 report. Over the next two months, contributors will explore what the report—and the method it inspired—can teach us about creating media for children today.
Every generation inherits a handful of visionary documents that ask not merely what the world is, but what it could and should become.
Sixty years ago, Joan Ganz Cooney’s report was such a document for education and public media. It challenged us to imagine that the most powerful technology of its day could serve our highest ideals: that every child, regardless of circumstance, deserved access to the joy of learning. Sesame Street was its first great expression. But the greatest legacy of this report is not Sesame Street alone. It is the conviction that technology should be judged not just by its commercial success or technical sophistication but by its capacity to expand human potential.
The significance of this report endures because of its contribution in three important ways:
- Historically, it inspired one of the most influential educational innovations of the twentieth century.
- Intellectually, it transformed the national conversation from whether television was inherently good or bad for children to how it could be intentionally designed to help them learn and thrive.
- Morally, it argued that society has an obligation to use its most powerful communications technologies to benefit children, especially those with the fewest advantages.
We should honor Joan Ganz Cooney not only for her vision, but for establishing a principle that I believe is even more urgent today than it was in 1966: every new communications technology carries with it a choice. It can simply capture people’s attention, or it can enrich the minds, strengthen the character, and expand the opportunities of its audience. As society wrestles with the promise and challenges of artificial intelligence and digital media, her enduring question remains the right one: How can we use our most powerful technologies to help children grow smarter, stronger, and kinder? So often anniversaries are merely exercises in nostalgia. This anniversary matters most because the work isn’t finished. Joan answered the question for television. This generation must now answer it for artificial intelligence.
The tools have changed. The responsibility has not.
Joan Ganz Cooney did not predict the future of media. She established a way of thinking about every future medium. She taught us that every communications revolution is also a moral revolution because each forces us to decide what kind of society we want to become. That is why her landmark report is more than a milestone in the history of television or education. It remains a blueprint for every generation that inherits a new technology and must decide what it is for and how to use it.
For Sesame Workshop, this job will never be finished, its mission will never be outdated, and its work will always be necessary and burn bright.
Jeffrey D. Dunn has spent his career leading brands and organizations through time periods of significant change, financial growth, and societal impact. He was President and CEO of Sesame Workshop from 2014-2020.
Read The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education here.
