Putting the FUN in Fundamentals: Exploring the Creation of the Edutainment Renaissance

Television is a ubiquitous part of American childhood, and has been since the 1950s. For many Americans, it’s hard not to think about the educational television, or edutainment, that raised us alongside parents and teachers when recalling what we watched growing up– programs like Dora the Explorer, the Reading Rainbow, or Sesame Street. Though, the relationship between education and television as we know it now hasn’t always been an aspect of children’s television, and was once considered a revolutionary change from the ways children’s television once was. This project examines the history of children’s television, its greatest critiques, and how it forever changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This project argues that the development and popularity of edutainment programs were a direct response to public outcry over excessive violence children’s programming alongside shared desires for better racial representation.