Educational Television Quotes

'The Great British Bake Off' is family entertainment. There aren't many programmes where all ages can sit and watch from beginning to end. Everything else is violent, cruel, and noisy. We're educational without viewers realising it.

I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries - on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn't think filming them was helping much, so I wondered how we could use TV for them, to teach them.

It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.

My father was invited to play on a television show when I was 17 or 18 that was an early equivalent of educational television, a Sunday afternoon kind of variety art show.

Anything that's on Discovery or Nat Geo, I'm pretty much watching it.

Big Bird was the biggest star, I mean, children's favorite for a number of years. I have a 22-year-old granddaughter whose first words were 'Big Bird.'

Bill Nye the Science Guy' was awesome.

I think what makes 'Jeopardy!' special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning.

The question for me was, could TV actually teach? I knew it could, because I knew 3-year-olds who sang beer commercials!

There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.

Well then, the ayes have it.

To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents.

It has become a crusade of mine to demonstrate that TV need not be violent to be exciting.

When he first started - Jim Henson, who created Bid Bird and Oscar - he said Big Bird was just a big, goofy guy. And it was - a script came along and I said, 'I think Big Bird would be much more useful to the show if he were a child learning all the things we were teaching in the show.' And so he didn't know the alphabet, even, for instance.

To be sure, educational programming likely benefits some of the children who seek it out, particularly those whose families can't afford the myriad options available today on cable or Netflix.

Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

The children were singing beer commercials. If they could learn from beer commercials why can't they learn 1,2, 3 and more.

Consumers can choose from hundreds of channels today, including dozens for kids. At a time of dwindling resources, we don't need to be subsidizing PBS. It's time for Big Bird the mooch to compete with 'Dora the Explorer' and 'Bob the Builder.'

We were only allowed to watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and 3-2-1 Contact!

I went to a catholic public school St Helens and learned English by watching bugs bunny cartoons.

I loved 'Beakman's World' growing up. As much as I loved 'Bill Nye,' I always preferred 'Beakman's World' because I thought it was funnier.

I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times -- (as I might if I develop Sesame Street).

I'm 100% proud of the TV work I achieved. The work I did on shows on insects and Great White sharks... stuff that's in school curriculums in England. Now they are showing up on Discovery Channel.

When I first saw children's television, I thought it was perfectly horrible. And I thought there was some way of using this fabulous medium to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.