Tag Archives: Lloyd Morrisett

Lloyd Morrisett (November 2, 1929 – January 15, 2023) was the co-founder of Sesame Street and Children’s Television Workshop, and a founding board member of both the Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. It is hard to overstate the value of his clear vision, his wise leadership, and his enduring impact on children and families, public media, and society at large. Today we honor him by inviting individuals who knew him well or worked with him to share a…

You may have heard that television programming in the 1960s was called a “vast wasteland.” by then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow. From the beginning, Lloyd Morrisett and I were both convinced that television – which was capturing the attention of children as nothing else was – did have the power to educate as well as to entertain and we set out to prove it. It was back in 1966 when I wrote my original report, The Potential Uses of Television in…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is thrilled to present a newly reformatted version of Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney’s still-relevant 1966 report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education made a convincing case for the power of television to prepare children, particularly in underserved communities, to succeed in kindergarten—and led directly to the program that revolutionized children’s media. We have reformatted the original photocopied report because we know today’s researchers, educators,…