Fred Rogers

Fred Rogers, known to popular culture as the host of the long-running children’s program “Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood,”, is the central focus in this work of biographical non-fiction. He is the person whose history and experiences are the focus of its narrative and thematic considerations, and the person whose life and work are the subject of its analytical commentary.

Throughout the main body of the work, which is constructed around a chronological description of important events and situations in Fred’s life, that analytical commentary focuses on the different factors that contributed to the development of his philosophy and practice of children’s education. Those factors range from the practical (i.e. the awareness that the medium of television could reach much higher numbers of children than education designed for classrooms) to the spiritual (i.e. a deep personal belief in the teachings of Presbyterian...