The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,32

was the beginning of the American Revolution, a war that before it was over would claim many lives and consume the entire American colony. When the American colonists declared independence the following year, it would be hailed as a victory for an entire nation. But that is not the way it began. It began on a cold spring morning, with a word of mouth epidemic that spread from a little stable boy to all of New England, relying along the way on a small number of very special people: a few Salesmen and a man with the particular genius of both a Maven and a Connector.

THREE

The Stickiness Factor

SESAME STREET, BLUE’S CLUES,

AND THE EDUCATIONAL VIRUS

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Ganz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three , four , and five year olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watchers to nonwatchers, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well after the children stopped watching the show. Cooney probably wouldn’t have used these concepts or described her goals in precisely this way. But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy. She called her idea Sesame Street.

By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. But it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile....Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter. Educational experts describe television as “low involvement.” Television is like a strain of the common cold that can spread like lightning through a population, but only causes a few sniffles and is gone in a day.

But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner—Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York—set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from television commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions. Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked. Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested—and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history—it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologists who don’t believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of those who watched the show regularly. The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of the second of the rules of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

1.

The Law of the Few, which I talked about