With the news of the CPB winding down, people were reminiscing about favorite PBS shows and I was reminded of a show I stumbled across as a teen. I apologize, I no longer remember the title. But the show used popular music videos and captioned them with highlights to note specific phonetic phenomenon. So all the long e's would be highlighted blue, while all the rest of the letters were white. It was a cool fun way to teach the concepts.
I understood phonetics pretty well as a teen, but my parents didn't want to pay for cable TV. Cable TV at the time, was the only way to access music videos. Well, cable TV and this show. So I watched to get to see music videos.
My mother had a book about "Sesame Street" as part of her coursework for her masters degree that I read for funsies.
It talked about how the show was designed to help lower and middle class bilingual children learn concepts about language and numbers that would help them catch up to monolingual English speaking classmates of middle and upper classes. And it did raise their skills. It just also raised the skills of the monolingual English speakers also.
One of the things that can be easy to overlook in places where you have privilege is that better accessibility benefits you to. So when we lose things like the CPB, yes some people will be harder hit by this loss. But the things we lose affect everyone.
