When a group of researchers got together in the late 60′s to see whether or not television could effectively play a role in helping children learn, Sesame Street was born — as a non-profit experiment. While Big Bird and his pals may still be around, we’ve gone steadily downhill over the past half-century since the show’s milestone achievements. Shows today don’t stop at the screen, but spill out into music, toys, concerts and video games. Shows that, basically, only exist to make money off clueless parents who place their children in front of televisions as though they were potted plants looking for sunlight. There’s a reason that more kids than ever before are growing up to be vapid, clueless adults — it’s the TV they’re raised on.

Some are creepy, others might make you scream: These are the 10 absolutely dumbest educational programs on TV.

Teletubbies

When the subject of stupid children’s shows comes up, Teletubbies usually springs up somewhere in the back of your mind. There’s a reason for that; it’s because it really is one of the absolute worst offenders on this list. Aside from the obvious creepiness — they’re extremely creepy — this show is a complete waste of broadcast time. It was apparently meant for a “pre-school” audience, but wound up having a fan base mostly made up of college-aged potheads — and even they said it was creepy. The four main characters run around, in a morbidly-obese ignorant bliss, basically doing nothing all day long, while occasionally stopping to worship their sun-god which is apparently an infant. It makes absolutely no sense, and kids who watch it aren’t developing anything in their heads except for a mold-like mush.

Barney & Friends

Barney made a huge splash well over a decade ago when the show got immensely popular, and in total it’s now been running for 18 years. It’s about some sort of daycare center where children use their imagination to spur a shared delusion of an imaginary dinosaur come to life. That imaginary dinosaur has other imaginary friends, and they all play together and teach the children rudimentary lessons in subjects they should already know, because the children in the daycare are quite obviously too old to be there. These children share in this rather disturbing delusion on a daily basis, which can only mean that either the show was horribly written, or that there is something in the water of the daycare that causes all the children to become massively schizophrenic. Either way, the show hardly taught a thing, and only caused a crop of odd children who thought that large men wearing animal suits would instantly be their best friends and teach them monosyllabic words on demand.

Jay Jay the Jet Plane

One word can sum up this show: Fleshlight. Watching all of about 3 seconds of this show will lead any modern person to see nothing but winged Fleshlights cruising around and talking to each other, and that’s about the gist of any episode. In the video above, the goal of the episode was apparently to teach children to take care of the environment, but that if anything does go wrong that they can fix it in one night flat. If they happen to kill their puppy or pour water all over the computer, it’s alright, because they can fix anything with a wish and a nap. That’s Jay Jay the Jet Plane — even less useful than a Fleshlight.

Dora the Explorer

Few children’s shows can cause so much rage and frustration as Dora the Explorer. The show doesn’t teach anything worthwhile to children, and parents who think that this trite garbage is teaching their kids Spanish are sorely mistaken, since the total sum of Spanish words in the show would amount to about as many fingers as they have to count with. The show does teach their kids something though; it teaches them to scream at the television, to hit the television, to run around the house screaming, to jump off furniture (screaming), to react loudly (by screaming) to any and all stimuli at any time of day in any situation, and as the episode in the video points out, to trust complete strangers because they say they’re nice. The very core of this show is irresponsible parenting; Dora’s parents should be brought up on charges. This is all once you get past the horrifyingly bad title — honestly, if you’re going to make a title that rhymes, finish the rhyme. Don’t half-ass it and make everyone think you’re going to rhyme the words and then duck out at the last minute. “Dora the Explora” would have been at least one notch less hate-worthy.

Oobi

It’s aggravating to think that so many people actually defend Oobi, claiming that it’s “award-winning” and that it’s “innocent” in that it’s a puppet show that uses only bare hands as puppets. This show is so inane that it’s almost physically painful. The bare-handed puppetry is nothing short of awful — you can probably catch better shadow-puppet shows in a movie theater on date night — but the really unnerving part is that the lessons given are useless and inane to the highest order. The show’s dressed up well enough as an educational series, but the only thing kids are learning by watching it is that they can pass off their crappy hand-puppeteering as professional because they saw the same caliber of dexterity on TV.

The Fresh Beat Band

How to make an episode of The Fresh Beat Band: Take an episode of Glee. Remove any trace of comedy, drama, story, acting, and skill from it. Hastily write bad lyrics for poppy songs that would make a young child jump around annoyingly. Make all colors very bright. Add Nickelodeon branding to the end result and say that it’s educational. You now have an episode of The Fresh Beat Band.

The Doodlebops

The Doodlebops is what happened when a bunch of Canadians got bored one day and decided they would mimic the American Christian Rock community in a clever scheme to make millions of dollars. The idea was sound enough, but it had a twist; they would market to children instead of religious folk. They got Disney backing and immediately exploded, and now they dance and sing their way around the world year after year — while small children sit watching them with blank expressions of stupidity that will likely stick for the remainder of their lives.

LazyTown

Oddly enough, LazyTown might be the most entertaining of the group, but only because it looks like it’s the best funded of the list. It’s also become the target of many sordid pedophilia-related Internet memes due to the fact that the show’s main character, a young girl, spends all her time hanging around and dancing with a very handsy 30-something french guy named Sportacus. Technically, the show’s goal is to inspire kids to go outside instead of sitting inside all day; which is ironic in that it’s a television show and that the kids must be sitting around the TV to watch it anyway. This show makes absolutely no sense, and doesn’t seem to have any real purpose other than to serve as an early exposure medium for children to get hooked on really bad techno music.

The Wiggles

Much like The Doodlebops, these guys basically capitalize on the idea that young children will sit and wave their hands around with mouths agape for hours so long as there are colorfully dressed people singing and dancing in front them. Unlike their comrades however, The Wiggles are a bunch of Aussies, who until this gig had been washed up has-been pop-rockers from the 80′s. The show basically attempts to retain attention by singing relentlessly about various and sundry subjects while never delivering any truly useful lessons. In the video, for example, they are apparently trying to teach pre-school aged children that they should go into the kitchen, cut up all the fruit, and make a tasty snack out of it. They make sure to state that the kids should use a plastic knife when they do this, but that actually getting their parents to OK the act is optional. Also, if it’s a fruit salad, why are they telling the kids to eat the fruits one type at a time afterwards? It’s like they’re trying to cause eating disorders.

BoohBah

BoohBah is, without a doubt, the single most disturbing thing you could possibly watch on television. This show goes beyond not making sense. This show makes negative sense — it goes past the breaking point in a reasonable person’s mind and causes a confusion the likes of which most people aren’t capable of experiencing without permanent damage. When it first aired, parents complained that it made their children cry, and that they had nightmares. If you watch the clip above, you might cry and have nightmares too. The only way to describe the show is to say that it’s as if the makers of The Teletubbies all got together with the crew that filmed The Ring, stayed awake for 40 straight hours, dropped acid, snorted coke and then decided to make videos of what they remembered of their nightmarish visions. This one takes the cake.