This paper covers issues concerning public or cable educational television for young children. The basic question is whether the use of an interactive system should be taught to young children by untrained family members in the home or by workers in day care centers. Preliminary studies of such a system for four-year-olds from both advantaged and disadvantaged homes indicate that they not only can learn to operate such a system with the help of a parent or sibling but enjoy it. The advantages of such a system include: (1) Both the parent and child can receive instruction; (2) Master teachers and expert programing can be made available to every child with access to TV; and (3) Immediate feedback and tangible reinforcement of appropriate responses implement learning in young children. Despite these advantages, the proposed system drew the full approval of only half of 10 educational specialists responding to a questionnaire on the system. This difference of opinion gives rise to two more issues: (1) the controversy on whether a tangible reward should be associated with learning in the young child, and (2) the question of whether the instruction should reward the child for learning a middle-class Anglo vocabulary or a minority-group vocabulary. Although some study has been made of these and other issues, it is recommended that interdisciplinary debate be conducted to provide guidance to public policy makers. (CK)