Intention

CHAPTER 15Living Our Values

“To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Fred Rogers—or as most of us know him, Mister Rogers—is the most famous American children's TV host. Between 1968 and 2001, he taped more than 1,000 episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, changed the lives of generations of kids, received more than 40 honorary degrees, and most recently, was memorialized by Tom Hanks on the big screen.¹

While many of us know him as a relentlessly kind, ethical, and immutable giant, this is an image he became, not one he was born with. In the 1950s, Rogers was studying to be a Presbyterian minister. He saw a children's TV program that featured adults throwing pies at each others' faces, trying to get a laugh out of their young audience. He couldn't quite put his finger on why, but it made him upset. There was something about the program that missed the point. As he later said: “I saw this new thing called television, and I saw people throwing pies in each other's faces, and I thought, ‘This could be a wonderful tool for education! Why is it being used this way?' So I said to my parents, ‘You know, I don't think I'll go into seminary right away. I think I'll go into television.’”²

Fred Rogers knew that the program he saw was misaligned with his view of the world, what he cared about, and what he thought it could be. And he believed that TV could be a powerful force in improving ...