It is a terrific television show and really uses all the resources of a visual image-based medium. If the claim is that Sesame Street makes kids like school, then it is only in the sense that kids will like school if it's like television. It may be that watchers of Sesame Street are learning their letters and numbers, but they are also learning many other things about learning. They are learning that it must always be entertaining, that learning is largely a matter of images, and that learning has to involve immediate gratification. All these collateral learnings turn out in the end to be much more important than whether kids are actually learning their letters and numbers.
Most kids learn letters and numbers in due time, anyway.
And that is the basis of my complaint. Well, you're going to be kind of surprised at how old my kids are. They were not Sesame Street watchers. They tended to be Mr. Rogers watchers. In our house there were always lots of books around.