As a college student, I’ve gotten pretty good — nay, excellent — at wasting time. The moment I sit down to do work, I am distracted by an endless chain of tangential thoughts, each linked ever-more-tenuously to the previous. Having Internet access only exacerbates the problem, as the very structure of the Internet echoes a tumultuous mind; websites lead to other websites in a vaguely linear fashion until you’re suddenly left wondering, “What was it I was looking for initially, and how did I end up in the IMDb goofs section for Charlotte’s Web? And, wow, did the actor who voiced the role of Templeton really die from ‘extreme substance abuse’?”

Given my toddler-caliber attention span, it isn’t all that surprising that I spent a sizeable portion of last Saturday morning watching old clips of Square One, the brilliant children’s show that ran on PBS in the late eighties. Square One had been a mainstay of my early childhood, and on Saturday I suddenly remembered why as I laughed my way through math-related music videos that flawlessly parodied popular genres. There was the inimitable “Nine, Nine, Nine,” a country-western hit about how the digits of multiples of nine add up to nine, and “Eight Percent of my Love,” in which a Springsteen look-alike explains to his girlfriend why she only gets eight percent of his love (his bicycle gets another eight percent, while his parents get a mere four). And who could forget that classic “The Mathematics of Love,” in which a doo-wop group from Phoenicia learns how to read roman numerals?

We truly grew up in the heyday of children’s television. By the eighties, it had become acceptable — even expected — to allow small children to watch television. This fact, coupled with the way that Baby Boomers were shifting their sense of entitlement to cover their children as well, led to a selection of quality television shows that catered to kids.

We grew up watching Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, Shining Time Station (before Ringo was replaced with George Carlin) and Sesame Street (before good old low-budget set design was replaced with computer animation). The kids who were lucky enough to have cable added such mainstays as The Mickey Mouse Club, Fraggle Rock, David the Gnome and Muppet Babies to their arsenal. The shows were educational, sure, but more importantly they were goofy, poignant and fun to watch.

Oh, how times have changed. Now cable has become almost ubiquitous, and the original 20 or so channels have blossomed into a myriad of stations that present kids with innumerable television choices, all of which are indistinguishable from one another, save a quick shuffling of which animal plays which role.

But worse than the banality is the spirit in which these shows have been designed. A vast majority of them have been engineered to maximize the cognitive and social development of their impressionable viewers while teaching valuable lessons and, occasionally, physical fitness at the same time. Maximizing cognitive and social development isn’t a bad goal in and of itself; it’s the way that producers try to achieve it that is troubling.

For example, the following description of Teletubbies — a clear favorite among the toddler set — comes from the “Educational Philosophy” section of its website: “The stories are structured so that the child is able to stay one step ahead of the Teletubbies, encouraging emerging abilities of prediction and visualization and, most vitally, developing confidence and self-esteem.”

Let me get this straight: we’re deliberately dumbing down shows for little kids so that they’ll know all the answers and feel good about themselves? This may be the worst idea I’ve ever heard. What about the satisfaction that comes from finally accomplishing something after several attempts? If children are taught early on that they should know the answers right away, they’re not going to want to persevere later on when they encounter roadblocks.

Lev Vygotsky, one of the earliest child development specialists, suggested that the optimal way for a child to learn was through “scaffolding” — he should be presented with tasks that are ever-so-slightly too difficult for him to solve on his own, and provided with just enough adult guidance to achieve the goal. As the child’s skills improve, the amount of guidance should steadily decrease, until he’s doing the task all by himself.

It makes perfect sense. Unless, of course, you’re a children’s television producer, in which case your educational philosophy is apparently, “Who needs scaffolding? Hell, why do we need buildings to begin with? Let’s just raze the whole city, and then we won’t even have to climb any stairs.”

We weren’t treated with such condescension when we were little kids; we were expected to watch the same shows our older siblings did, and if we didn’t understand what “M-I-C-K-E-Y” spelled out, well, maybe next year we would. If fractions were lost on us, Square One’s “Thriller”-esque “Probability” would still be highly entertaining. If we didn’t see what was so funny about R.E.M. appearing on Sesame Street to perform “Shiny, Happy Monsters,” at least our parents did.

And perhaps that’s the most important thing that’s lost. Whereas children’s shows 15 years ago were funny on a level that adults could appreciate while simultaneously being goofy enough to enthrall small children, shows today are so carefully formulated to appeal to toddlers that they’re insipid. Instead of watching and enjoying television with their kids, parents are using it as a guilt-free distraction while they do other things — and the lack of parental involvement will more than counteract any “benefits” that producers’ patronization will have.

And that’s a damn S-H-A-M-E.