For the past few months I have been deep into a research project about the educational philosophy of Fred Rogers; or, more affectionately, Mister Rogers. Having grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, this research has stimulated more than just a sense of nostalgia. It has led me to reflect on the influence Mister Rogers and his show had on me as a child and as an educator. Below are some loose notes on how he affected me at different times in my life.
I remember watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood (MRN) on PBS after my older siblings went to school. I would walk them down the road to the bus stop, then come home and watch Mister Rogers. I don’t know how often I actually watched the show, but I have some vivid memories of this routine. One of my earliest impressions of the show was on a lemony spring day. My mom was sitting on the kitchen floor sewing while I watched an episode of MRN. When it was finished I walked over to her and saw that a snake was coiled up beside her. I mentioned this to her, and she reassured me that it was a toy. It was a real snake, however, and once she realized that it wasn’t rubber, the snake slithered off out the sliding glass door behind her. Interestingly, this was not the only time she had such intimate and unexpected experiences with wild snakes.
I vividly remember numerous effects that the aesthetics of the show had on me. I remember really loving Trolley. The idea of having a little track in your house that a toy trolley traveled around on was intriguing to me; perhaps also for the fact that the trolley always took us to the land of make believe. Picture picture was also very curious to me. It was a peculiar and somewhat mysterious feature of his otherwise “ordinary” house. I think I enjoyed the thought of a mundane picture frame transforming into a television. Another curious aspect of Mister Rogers’ house was the random stoplight in the corner of his living room. Perhaps in a house with a trolley it is not out of place, but I always felt that there was something playfully non sequitur about that.
The house itself always felt cozy and inviting to me. It always had this mood of mid-afternoon; it felt like it was somewhere in-between nap and the time when my older siblings came home from school. I think, for me, it contributed to this feeling of being suspended in time almost. There is a distinct calmness in Mister Rogers’ home, but also this palpable sense of potential—a feeling of anticipation about what will or could happen next. The shots of the model neighborhood contributed to this mood for me. The neighborhood in those sequences most literally was a toy, and it stimulated a sense of adventure and wonder about what and who might be out there.
Of course, Mister Rogers’ mannerisms and way of speaking contribute to the overall mood and aesthetic as well. It is very intimate and personal. In a way, it always felt akin to visiting the homes of our elderly neighbors (interestingly, almost all the people who lived on our little dirt road were elderly). The show’s music, though, plays an important and subtle role in gluing all of this together. The music was played live during every episode, and the effect really is noticeable. What would the show have been like had they just used pre-recorded stock music every time? The live and improvised music made the subtleties of the show more expressive. Everything about the show is understated, but the organic and lyrical live instrumentation “narrating” each episode cast in relief the distinctively human intimacy that was the heart of the show. The mundane became dynamic and malleable; something conversational, something we could share in creating.
as a big kid/young adult
I don’t think I thought about Mr. Rogers much after I grew out of the show. Something that does occur to me in hindsight is that MRN was not uncool to older kids in the same way that shows like Barney or Teletubbies were. Of course, as pre-teens and teenagers we were not fans of the show perhaps, but my recollection is that MRN was not the target of the same kind of disdain older kids acquire about shows for “babies.”
When I started college, I ended up volunteering and working in elementary schools, and looking back, I think that my common sense about education and working with children must have been rooted partly in what I learned form MRN as a child—what was demonstrated on that show. In my second year of college, I had a huge class of third graders under my wing in the afterschool program. It was a wonderful experience. I was only 19 or 20 years-old then; much closer to the kids’ age than the other adults at that time. Being with them made sense to me. We just played. Kids are good at playing, and being on that level was all it took. At that school I became the one they called when kids with severe behavioral issues were having an episode. In those cases we would go off and talk together, play, or just spend time doing things separately but together. I was very patient with them—probably more patient than I would be now. When I look back on that time, I feel rather proud of my younger self for being so sensitive and responsive to the needs of those children. I had many role models—such as my parents and other family members—so it would be unreasonable to credit MRN entirely as the polar north to my heart’s compass about education. But as I got older, had more experiences working in education, and studied it more extensively, I had several epiphanies about Mister Rogers and the value of his approach to educational television.
At some point I realized that I held MRN to be the gold standard of children’s media. I recall on numerous occasions feeling that so many shows for kids are condescending, half-baked, low effort, consumerist garbage. I absolutely despise the aesthetics of these low quality shows and what they suggest about children—that they can’t tell the difference if it is bad, and even if they could, it wouldn’t matter. It is actually quite disgusting that so much children’s media is used or designed to directly or indirectly advertise to children. On the one hand, we make education compulsory and withhold rights from children under the pretense that they are not capable of making rational judgements, yet subverting their attention and interests to manipulate them into buying cheap bullshit is not unconscionable in our society. That’s not very neighborly of us, is it?
MRN is a masterfully crafted show. It has aesthetic and moral integrity. The more I studied education the more I came to appreciate just how this is the case. Sustained, in-depth research and work in education had a disenchanting effect on me. There is nothing innocent about modern compulsory education, really. Over the years I have found that what has kept me motivated to remain involved with it in a professional capacity has been a hope—or foundational belief even—that education can be made good. I don’t have much faith at all in clever policies or the institutionalization of education itself, but I have a profound trust in the capacity of real people to appreciate each other’s humanity. At the end of the day, that is all we have. MRN demonstrates in the most straightforward and unpretentious way just how powerful loving kindness is and how mundane and basic to human life it is. Acknowledging your own self worth, your own feelings, and your natural proclivity to wonder and grow is a precondition for being a good neighbor and for cooperatively reconstructing the neighborhood you inhabit.
If Mister Rogers could effectively express and demonstrate this point to pre-school aged children—through television no less—then what excuse does our ‘adult world’ have for compelling our children to compete for limited opportunities and access to social goods? What kind of neighborhood is that supposed to be? MRN invites viewers to see the difference for themselves and to see what difference they can make in their own lives when motivated by their own existential wonder and capacity to love and be loved.
There are many lyrics of Rogers’ that I love dearly, but these lines of the closing theme song always stood out to me:
It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive, It’s such a happy feeling you’re growing inside
Instead of making our children feel that they are not worthy—that their value is conditional—imagine if we allowed them to fully benefit from experiencing the profound joy of being the wonderful and wondering organism that they are.
That would be a beautiful day in the neighborhood, indeed.