When a seven-foot, yellow-feathered bird who is subject to depressions attempts to seat himself upon the letter “h” and fails, it is no longer simply an event in children’s television, or even in the media. It is part of the intellectual history of a generation, who are already in important ways the children of “Sesame Street.” There is an idiocy in current discourse, which calls things about which people can be angry or mistaken “controversial.” In that sense, “Sesame Street” and its sequel, “The Electric Company,” are controversial programs. It is as though all the lessons of New Deal federal planning and the sixties experience of the “local people,” the techniques of the totalitarian slogan and the American commercial, the devices of film and the cult of the famous, the research of educators and the talent of artists had combined in one small experiment to sell, by means of television, the rational, the humane, and the linear to little children.

The human characters of “Sesame Street” live in a brownstone on an integrated urban slum block, where, in the company of cloth figures called Muppets—most of which are brightly colored and furry—they teach, among other things, the alphabet, induction, friendliness, geometric forms, and counting. Oscar, the green-furred grouch who inhabits a trash can, where he collects fish heads, mud, an old sneaker, a petrified brownie, and who makes occasional trips, for the sake of his collection, to the dump, is not just a creature of whimsey, with a tendency to rant; he is something of an expert on ecology. His neighbor is the inexhaustibly obliging blue-furred Muppet Grover, who will run great distances, interminably, to illustrate the concepts “near” and “far,” who will patiently deliver to a restaurant customer the letters missing from his alphabet soup, who will dance, sing, and demonstrate in waltz time, “Around, around, around, around, over, under, and through,” and who will be frightened out of his hiccups and into unconsciousness by a not altogether successful creature called the Snuffleupagus, whom all the human members of the cast, black and white, Puerto Rican and Anglo, still take to be a figment of the seven-foot bird’s imagination.

Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch “Sesame Street” do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it. Children who watch it frequently do better than children who watch it rarely. Children who begin to watch it at the age of three learn more rapidly than children who begin at four. Eighty per cent of America’s twelve million preschool children have watched it. Ninety-seven per cent of American households now have television. Yet Joan Ganz Cooney, the founder of the Children’s Television Workshop, which created both “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company,” points out that in a survey of activities favored by preschool children watching television ranks second from the bottom, followed only by “petting my dog.” “They don’t dislike petting their dog,” Mrs. Cooney says. “It’s just not high on the list of their priorities.” Neither, evidently, is watching television. It doesn’t play with them, or, normally, offer them the pleasure of acquired competence in anything. But lots of children, particularly disadvantaged children, are becoming (in an expression the Children’s Television Workshop once used in research but now regrets) “zombies”—riveted, without any discernible reaction, to the television set; getting, within a year or two, beyond the natural aptitude of learning, for example, to read.

In the first year of “Sesame Street’s” existence, a Muppet, a cartoon, or a famous person from a network program (Bill Cosby, Pat Paulsen, all the Cartwrights from “Bonanza”) would recite the whole alphabet each day, not just for the sake of repetition but out of concern that a child who saw only ten letters in a single program might be misled into thinking he had mastered the whole thing. One day, the research staff discovered what has since been known as the James Earl Jones Effect. Mr. Jones recited the twenty-six letters slowly, in a tone of menace, staring directly into the camera. At the first recitation, children repeated the letters in his pauses; at the second, they were beginning to recognize the letters as they appeared on the screen beside him; after that, they began very quickly and with pleasure to recite the alphabet before him. The alphabet has now acquired, through the prestige the celebrities brought to it at first, and through later developments among the regular live cast, cartoons, and Muppets, such currency in preschool circles that daily repetitions are no longer necessary. Counting, too, has gone up since the first year, from ten to twenty; and when Big Bird persists in believing that the alphabet is a single, beautiful word pronounced “ab-ka-def-gi-jekyl-mnop-ker-stew-uk-zee,” which he can sing but not decipher, nobody seems confused, except him.

On “Sesame Street,” there has been an amiable, senile Muppet pedant, Herbert Birdsfoot, who is in the habit of addressing Kermit, the Muppet frog, as “young man,” and who, being profoundly devoted to physical education, found himself stuck one day in the middle of a deep knee bend. “Young man,” he said, looking pensively at the floor, to Kermit, “do you realize that you have webbed feet?” Kermit himself has given many lecture-demonstrations, among them one that embroiled him with the letter “W,” that program’s sponsor. Every program is “sponsored” by a few letters and numbers, which are given elaborate commercials in graphics and song. “Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap” may not be everybody’s description of the four lines of the letter “W,” but it was Kermit’s, and the shaggy blue-furred Cookie Monster ate the lecture’s subject anyway, transforming it, with successive bites, into an askew “N,” a “V,” a tilted “l,” and nothing. A substitute “W” began to wiggle, walk, and wobble—in a kind of visual, extraprose equivalent of onomatopoeia (the word “path” on “The Electric Company” walks down one)—and ultimately wrestle (a phonemic mistake, unusual on the program) with Kermit until he weakened. Kermit has had other misfortunes with lessons. When he was counting four eggs, for example, they hatched, and the chickens began to walk away, leaving three, and then two, and then one. “All right,” Kermit said, “there’s only one chicken left, so let’s count it.” The program is extremely patient with error and frustration.

There is the Muppet Ernie, neurotic, easily moved to tears, particularly by the letter “E,” with which his name begins. A Muppet salesman, with a green face and a blue nose, dressed in a shirt, tie, trousers, jacket, black hat, and trenchcoat, has repeatedly tried to sell Ernie the number 8. “Hang it on the wall,” he suggests at the beginning of his sales pitch. “Next time you wanna know how many legs an octopus has . . . next time you wanna know how many reindeer Santa Claus has . . . next time you wanna know what time you eat your breakfast . . .” and, with each sinister and ingratiating phrase, he flashes the 8 inside his trenchcoat furtively toward Ernie. It costs a nickel. Ernie does not buy it. “Sesame Street’s” attitudes toward consumerism are skeptical, except in the realm of learning.

“Our next contestant,” says the Muppet master of ceremonies in a little parody of the quiz show “Concentration,” “is a monster from Sesame Street.” The contestant is the Cookie Monster, known to some as Monster, to some as Cookie, and to fathers in the world outside, at bedtime, as a difficult creature to imitate the voice of. Cookie is a fanatic, undeviating in the quality of his obsession. He eats things. Many lessons on “Sesame Street” are terminated when something eats them. But Cookie, who has of late been eating mainly cookies, is a junkie. “To me, your nose is a cookie,” he once said to another Muppet in a desperate moment. He sees cookies in all things circular: a rubber-tire swing, or a bicycle wheel. Geometric forms are among the program’s many subjects. When cookies arrive, he tends to eat the entire shipment, but he is moved to empathy at the sight of a human being temporarily deprived of a cookie. “How sad,” he says. “You taking it so well.” He has never quite correctly learned the language. Other characters on “Sesame Street” use dialect, make grammatical errors, even speak in Spanish. The black expression “Give me some skin” has now become so common among characters asking for a handshake that Muppets say “Give me some fur.” On the quiz show, Cookie won by losing. There were four numbers on the wall, concealing prizes. As in “Concentration,” the object was to name the numbers that concealed matching prizes. Cookie failed to match anything. He lost a jet plane and won a consolation cookie. “Sesame Street” does not overvalue competition.