In its 50 years on television, “Sesame Street” has presented an expansive idea of the challenges of childhood, offering lessons on divorce, racism, grieving and autism — as well as help with the alphabet and accepting friends who are a bit taller and more birdlike.

Next week, a new version of the show will begin airing for an audience that, less than a decade ago, didn’t exist: children displaced by the war in Syria and their neighbors in the communities where many of the refugees have fled or sought asylum. “At this point, there are lots of 7-year-olds who were born as refugees from Syria” and remain far from permanent resettlement, a staff member on the project said recently. “That’s not changing soon.”

Since the start of the conflict, in 2011, nearly seven of every 10 residents of Syria have been forced from their homes. More than 11 million have fled to unfamiliar parts of Syria or to the countries across its borders, with only around 150,000 permanently resettled. They are now the largest displaced population in the world. And displacement, in the Middle East and elsewhere, lasts longer than ever before: “Once refugees are displaced for at least five years, as is the case for most Syrian refugees,” the president of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said at a Senate hearing last year, they’re likely to stay displaced for more than two decades.

“Sesame Street” began as an experiment in television and became a global model for early-childhood education. Its new project, launched with the I.R.C. and educators in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, is an effort to rethink humanitarian aid. “Aid is good at keeping people alive,” Mr. Miliband has argued. “But it doesn’t give them the tools to thrive.” It has traditionally been directed to immediate needs — nutrition, security, shelter — but displacement that can last for decades presents a very different kind of problem.