\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>or those whose cultural experiences are largely absorbed through the prism of their mewling infants\u2019 demands for the same thing 437 times in a row, it\u2019s been a long four months. In late October last year, Rachel Accurso released Brush Your Teeth Song with Ms Rachel and Elmo. The 48m views it has since racked up reflect its status as a solid addition to the Ms Rachel canon, and the whole thing is obviously enhanced by Elmo\u2019s guest spot. But it was studded with reheated clips from previous compilations, such as The Wheels on the Bus from Blippi & Ms Rachel Learn Vehicles, and It\u2019s Potty Time from Potty Training With Ms Rachel. There is a limit to the number of plays an adult can reasonably be expected to endure of a bear puppet in a nappy hymning his ability to relieve himself, and the Ms Rachel hive is thirsting for something new.<\/p>\n Enter, on Friday, Learn With Ms Rachel \u2013 Friendship & Social Skills, an hour-long compendium, in which the leviathan of contemporary children\u2019s edutainment helps her guests \u201cmodel important social skills such as kindness, taking turns, sharing, asking a friend to play and helping others\u201d. A few minutes on any of the subreddits that pore over Ms Rachel content clarifies the weight of this cultural moment. Or you could ask my two-year-old about it.<\/p>\n More than a sop to the ravenous hordes of toddlers who devour this stuff, though, the new video is Accurso\u2019s first full-length attempt to meld her front-footed assertion of the rights of Palestinian children to play, and even to live, with the singsong cheeriness of Ms Rachel\u2019s oeuvre. Keep politics out of the pabulum that distracts my kid while I\u2019m making their dinner, some critics have demanded. Ms Rachel has thought about it, and decided she would rather not.<\/p>\n And so, after a brief prologue in which we are asked to share pretend ice-cream, a doorbell rings: \u201cRahaf\u2019s here!\u201d We cut to Ms Rachel sitting on the floor with a button-nosed three-year-old on her lap. As well as being preposterously cute, Rahaf is a double amputee: unmentioned in the video is that she lost her legs when an Israeli airstrike hit her home in Gaza. Her mother brought her to the US for surgery, but her father and two brothers were not permitted to go with them. Pictures of Rahaf in hospital in previous reports can only gesture at the catastrophe that she and her family endured; but here she is, pretending to nap alongside the titular rabbits of Hop Little Bunnies, bouncing sunnily from side to side when they wake up, then hurling herself back into Ms Rachel\u2019s arms.<\/p>\n <\/span>Preposterously cute \u2026 Learn With Ms Rachel.<\/span> Photograph: Youtube<\/p>\n Accurso has always sought to emphasise that she wants every child to have the same freedom that she claims for Rahaf, and the rest of the episode serves as proof of the principle. We learn how to say hello in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Tagalog and American sign language; an anxious puppet called Frankie is assured that his purple skin does not make him an outsider; there are children with physical and intellectual disabilities, a wheelchair swing, and a video call with Zach, who uses a communication device to say: \u201cHi, Ms Rachel. I love you.\u201d None of these children are gawked at; they\u2019re taking their rightful place in the kindergarten, and that\u2019s the end of it.<\/p>\n The overall effect is an expansive vision of who gets to play, or be seen as deserving of care. There\u2019s something hilarious, and moving, in the unapologetic relish with which Accurso rejects the idea that any of this is outside her lane, with every new scene taking another spin of the woke tombola. Oh, you thought the kaleidoscopic language lessons were a lot? Wait till you hear this Palestinian guy play the qanun!<\/p>\n Ms Rachel is far from the first entertainer and educator to present her audience with something other than the stilted monochrome of Watch With Mother. In an extraordinary 1981 episode of the US programme Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood, Fred Rogers met Jeff Erlanger, a 10-year-old wheelchair user who described his recent surgery, explained how stories cheered him up when he felt low, and sang his host\u2019s best-known song, It\u2019s You I Like. In the BBC\u2019s magnificent Something Special, Mr Tumble (Justin Fletcher) places disabled and neurodiverse children front and centre. And Sesame Street\u2019s revolutionary appeal was to make \u201cthe four-year-old inner-city black youngster\u201d its target audience before any other.<\/p>\n Still, Accurso is doing something radical in the current climate. Kids like Rahaf and Jeff remain mostly notable by their absence from the mainstream. And a good portion of the YouTube slop served up to children is made by people who appear to see the form chiefly as a commercial opportunity; the creator of the cursed Blippi, after all, was previously known as Steezy Grossman, a grossout comedian who went viral when he defecated on a naked collaborator.<\/p>\n Accurso, in contrast, worked in a summer camp for disabled children, taught refugee children in Maine and spent years as a preschool music teacher. Anyone seeking to dismiss her as a tiresome symbol of the woke mind virus must also accept that the kids who love her are infected, too. Friendship & Social Skills suggests that if a toddler can understand that killing children is wrong, that is not a sign of the assertion\u2019s naivety \u2013 but evidence of its elemental truth.<\/p>\n A lowball estimate of Ms Rachel\u2019s total view count is 13.5bn. Formidable though she is, that number is less a measure of algorithmic ruthlessness than of what the parents who entrust their children to her can assume, the same things she can give Rahaf, at least for the duration of the segment: delight. Warmth. And, above all, safety.<\/p>\n Learn With Ms Rachel is on YouTube now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those whose cultural experiences are largely absorbed through the prism of their mewling infants\u2019 demands for the same thing 437 times in a row, it\u2019s been a long four months. In late October last year, Rachel Accurso released Brush Your Teeth Song with Ms Rachel and Elmo. The 48m views it has since racked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1882,1896,693,2655,5593,1085,1779,23472,1569],"class_list":{"0":"post-45653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-event","9":"tag-learn","10":"tag-millions","11":"tag-rachel","12":"tag-radio","13":"tag-review","14":"tag-television","15":"tag-undoubtedly","16":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}