Lloyd Morrisett died at the age of 93. He was one of the people who made Sesame Street, the educational TV show that millions of kids around the world watch.
Morrisett’s death was first reported on Tuesday by Sesame Workshop, a non-profit organization that he helped start when it was called the Children’s Television Workshop. No reason was given for the death. Post Given Below From Offical Account.
Sesame Workshop mourns the passing of our esteemed and beloved co-founder Lloyd N. Morrisett, PhD, who died at the age of 93. pic.twitter.com/I9cSez95Px
— Sesame Workshop (@SesameWorkshop) January 23, 2023
Morrisett was born in Oklahoma City in 1929. He first studied to be a teacher, but he also had a background in psychology. He worked at Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic foundation focused on education and became an experimental teacher looking for new ways to teach kids from poorer families.
While he was working there, he joined forces with public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney to form the Children’s Television Workshop. Their goal was to make educational shows for kids.
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Its first show, Sesame Street, came out in November 1969. By the end of its first season, it had reached more than half of the 12 million three- to five-year-olds in the US. Sesame Street is now the biggest source of informal education in the world. Each year, it reaches millions of kids in more than 140 countries and has won nearly 200 Emmys.
Morrisett would later say that he got the idea when he woke up early one morning in 1965 and saw his three-year-old daughter Sarah mesmerized by a TV station ID message while waiting for cartoons to start. In 1966, he met Cooney at a dinner party and told her about it.
In an interview in 2004, he said, “There was something interesting about it.” “What is a child doing looking at a station ID? What does this mean?” I had no idea. I asked Joan, “Do you think that young children could learn from TV?” She said, “I’m not sure, but I’d like to talk about it.”
In his book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, Michael Davis wrote about this time: “Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles.” “It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Sarah’s mastery of jingles led to one of the main ideas behind Sesame Street: if TV could teach children the words and music to ads, why couldn’t it teach them more important things by using the same things that made ads so effective?”
Cooney spent months going to different places in the US to talk to teachers, child psychologists, experts on child development, and TV producers for a study called The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education. Half of the country’s school districts didn’t have kindergartens at the time.