Like millions of children around the world, I grew up watching Sesame Street. Many of them will tell you they learned English from it. I didn't, because I was frightened of the monsters. Television sets had legs back then, and the creatures inside them did not, and that bothered me more than I could explain.
My first English word came from an afterschool class near my home. The teacher taught us to draw it. A hammer made the T, a chair made the h and a nail made the i. Then the nail bent under the hammer's blow and became the s. The word was “This,” and I have never forgotten how to draw it. That drawing taught me one word. It also made me want to learn the rest, and that wanting is what eventually brought me to America.
Years later I joined Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind Sesame Street, and became executive producer of Sesame Street English, a program teaching English to children across Asia. The monsters I had been afraid of became my colleagues.
Back at Harvard
This semester I was back at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this time at the front of the room. Professor Amin Marei invited me into his course, Learning Design for All, to spend a session with the Class of 2027. I started at HGSE in the fall of 2023, when ChatGPT had only just entered the conversation. In those first weeks of the semester nobody was quite sure what any of it meant yet.
I shared my path from Japan to the US with the students, starting with that word on the afterschool blackboard. I also talked about how my work in media and education kept running into what I was studying at Harvard. Three years later, much of that conversation has changed. The hard question is the same one we had in 2023: who the technology reaches, and who it quietly passes by.
Who the Technology Reaches
Roughly 1.5 billion people speak English or are learning it. The British Council's Future of English report found that demand for English still depends on teachers. It also found that technology can widen access while widening the gap between people who have it and people who don't.
A mission statement can promise “every child,” but the money that pays for a program shapes which children it reaches. Public and philanthropic funders usually ask for equity and for evidence that children learned. Investors usually ask for growth, counted in paying students. Both kinds of funding are legitimate, and they pull a program in different directions.
I left the students with three questions I still ask myself:
- If you were the producer, which children would you choose to serve?
- Given that choice, how would you fund the program and keep it running for fifteen years, long enough for those children to graduate?
- With today's technology, what would you use to reach those children at scale, and what would it help you prove about a child by graduation?
What a Learning System Can't See
Learning software reports what it was built to report, such as lessons completed, answers marked right or wrong and progress through a sequence. My afterschool teacher had none of that. If he had, his records would have shown one word learned. They would not have shown that I had started wanting something new, or that English would become the way I reached it. I think that second outcome is what education programs should be trying to prove, and I don't know of a system that measures it yet.
If you work on these questions, or have answers of your own, reach out.
The views in this article are my own and do not represent Sesame Workshop.