The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education introduced a new way of working: researchers, educators, writers, producers, and children came together to shape what to teach, how to teach it, and how to know whether it worked. Sixty years later, we revisit this seminal report with a new weekly series, The Blueprint Outlasted the Medium: The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, Sixty Years Later.
This week, our contributors return to that model and the enduring idea that the best children’s media is built through cross-disciplinary collaboration, grounded in research, and shaped by children themselves.
Ten years ago, I called Joan Ganz Cooney’s 1966 report the most successful edtech business plan you’ve never read. Today, I’d go even further: it remains the best one ever written.
I came to it first as a former history teacher, then as an investor. What struck me both times was not only the vision, but the discipline underneath it. She grounded every recommendation in research: she interviewed the leading cognitive psychologists and educators of her day, then took a clear position where they disagreed. That blend of educational research and operational rigor is rare—on one page she’s citing Piaget, the next she’s talking about operational budgets. And when the research was “inconclusive,” she made the show itself the experiment. Taking Jerome Bruner’s advice, she treated the first year of broadcasting as an inquiry: launch the show, then find out whether children were actually learning from it. She was working in the spirit of Lean Startup methodology forty years before Steve Blank helped launch what we now call the lean startup movement.
The lesson: treat research as a foundation, not a ceiling. Build on it, test it, add to it. Nearly every strong founder I’ve backed over the past decade works this way, whether or not they’ve ever heard of Joan Ganz Cooney.
But the part of the report I return to most is its starting point. She began with children and a simple observation: they were memorizing advertising jingles and sitting through adult westerns. While, most adults saw a problem, she recognized that media had captured children’s attention and wondered what might happen if something educational met them there.
Today our attention has moved again—to devices, and increasingly to AI. The temptation is to lament, once again, that this new technology is ruining a generation. Joan Ganz Cooney offered a more productive response: understand the fascination, then bring real learning science to the task of creating something better.
Sixty years later, that’s still the whole job. I’m grateful to her for showing us how it’s done—and to Sesame Workshop for six decades of proving it can be.
Jennifer Carolan is a former K-12 history teacher who transitioned into venture capital to leverage technology to address educational inequality. She is the co-founder and general partner of Reach Capital, a premier education technology venture firm that has backed more than 120 companies focused on learning, health, and work.
