Television has four sections, "A Proposal", "Planning", "Broadcasting" and "Lessons from Sesame Street". The book also has a preface and an epilogue, written by Lesser, a foreword written by Joan Ganz Cooney, and an introduction by Lloyd Morrisett. Scattered throughout the book are cartoons drawn by children's author Maurice Sendak, who attended the 1968 seminars. Lesser begins his book by describing the origin of Sesame Street and his part in it. He had been studying child development and how its concepts could be used to teach children; since 1961, he studied children's reaction to television and whether or not the medium could be used to teach them. In 1966, he was approached by Cooney and Morrisett to assist them in creating the new show's educational objectives and research goals, and he agreed despite his misgivings about the effectiveness of television as a teaching tool. Sesame Street's audience included any child in the country who wished to watch it, but Lesser reports that the producers' original purpose was to reach the poor children of America. Lesser states, "If the series did not work for poor children, the entire project would fail". He is critical of the American public school system, and blames its failure to educate children on the lack of defined goals. When he wrote Television and Children, most American children received no preschool education. The first two chapters of the book detail the reasons for the experiment of creating an educational television program like Sesame Street, especially in regards to its audience. "Grownups never seem to understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them". Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince. Gerald Lesser used this quote to begin the second section of Children and Television. He introduced many of his sections and chapters with pertinent quotes. Lesser opens the section on "Planning" by relating how many of the cast and crew were recruited: executive producer David Connell, producer Sam Gibbon, head writer Jon Stone, producer and writer Matt Robinson, Jim Henson, composer Joe Raposo, and actors Loretta Long, Bob McGrath, and Will Lee. Lesser also recounts the process of hiring head researcher Edward L. Palmer and those involved with community outreach. The producers of the new show spent eighteen months planning, something that was unprecedented in children's television. Lesser extensively describes the series of curriculum seminars that took place