A política da Rua Sésamo

O programa "Rua Sésamo" começou a ser transmitido nos EUA a 10 de novembro de 1969, faz hoje  50 anos (começou a dar em Portugal em 1989 já eu teria uns 15 ou 16 anos, pelo acho que nunca o vi). Ao contrário do que se poderia pensar, em certos quadrantes chegou a geral algumas polémicas:

The Way to Sesame Street, por Jesse Walker, na Reason (novembro de 2009):

The show emerged from the same Great Society milieu that had produced the Head Start preschool program. That guaranteed it would be a magnet for controversy. In his 2006 book Sesame Street and the Reform of Children's Television, the historian Robert Morrow notes that preschool in the '60s was frequently framed as a project for the impoverished, who were presumed to suffer from "cultural deprivation." Not surprisingly, many poor people found this attitude haughty and high-handed. The middle class, meanwhile, often saw the home as "a haven to be protected from intrusions by educators as well as by television." (...)

Inevitably, there were culture war controversies. Feminists complained that one human character, Susan, was too much of a traditional homemaker; conservatives grumbled that another woman, Maria, was too feminist. Morrow quotes a leftist viewer's complaint that the "cat who lives in the garbage can should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution, even Sesame Street, to get out of it." More broadly, there were the anxieties that always attach themselves to a centralized medium beaming unvetted images and ideas into the home. Marie Winn, author of the TV-bashing book The Plug-In Drug, spoke for many Americans when she warned that the program was "promoting television viewing even among parents who might feel an instinctive resistance to plugging such young children in." Monica Sims, an official at the BBC, felt the show's attempts to mold children's behavior were a form of "indoctrination" with "authoritarian aims."

E, para um artigo ainda mais antigo e claramente crítico, Big Bird, Meet Dick and Jane, de John Holt (o inspirador da que podemos chamar a "ala esquerda" do ensino doméstico), publicado em The Atlantic em maio de 1971:

The operating assumption of the program is probably something like this: poor kids do badly in school because they have a “learning deficit." Schools, and school people, all assume that when kids come to the first grade they will know certain things, be used to thinking and talking in a certain way, and be able to respond to certain kinds ul questions and demands. Rich kids on the whole know all this; poor kids on the whole do not. Therefore, if we can just make sure that the poor kids know what the rich kids know by the time they get to school, they will do just as well there as the rich kids. So goes the argument. I don’t believe it. Poor kids and rich kids are more alike when they come to school than is commonly believed, and the difference is not the main reason poor kids do badly when they get there. In most ways, schools are rigged against the poor; curing “learning deficits,” by Head Start, Sesame Street , or any other means, is not going to change that.

E uma polémica mais recente - a semi-privatização da série, em que os episódios agora passam primeiro na HBO e só depois em canal aberto, na rede pública de televisão, o que tem sido criticado porque irá exatamente contra o espírito de uma série criada com a intenção de dar apoio educacional às crianças pobres.