(This is a re-post of one of the first posts on this blog, on its three year anniversary.)
Children’s Television Pioneer Fred Rogers once said: “Imagining something may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or visions into inventions.”
It was this belief, and his desire to instill it in children, that led him to create numerous short films of production processes in small factories around the United States. In each film, one of the characters on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, “Mr. McFeely,” ostensibly traveled to the factory where the process could be videotaped, explained by the factories’ proprietors and employees, and ultimately narrated by Fred Rogers himself.
As David Newell, who portrayed Mr. McFeely, recounted in “It’s You I Like,” a recent PBS documentary about Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers wanted to “tell children that [these products] aren’t magically made by themselves. Those machines don’t think up how to make them. It takes a person to make anything.”
American producer and writer Judd Apatow, reflecting on the effect of watching such episodes as a child, says, “As a tiny kid, you don’t know how anything is made. So if you’re four, and Mr. Rogers goes to the crayon factory, that’s the first time you realize, Oh, people make this. There’s a machine involved. There’s a man or woman working on it.”
That every good or service we need or love is made by people, that producing is difficult to do, and that the people who do produce deserve our deep appreciation, are wonderful lessons for children to learn. And perhaps for adults to be reminded of, from time to time.
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