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Everything in the library, in one continuous scroll — our own explainers and stories, next to clips we keep coming back to. Tap any video to play.
- HigherSelf Original
Understanding Your Mortgage — a HigherSelf Explainer
A plain-language walk-through of how a mortgage actually works, so you can walk into the process informed and confident.
- HigherSelf Original
How Taina & Jamel Found Their Home
Through HigherSelf housing workshops and coordination with our program partners, Taina and Jamel moved from renting into a home of their own. Here’s their story.
- HigherSelf Original
Building Spark House — a HigherSelf Partner Story
A look at how HigherSelf helped get Spark House off the ground, from early idea to a working business.
- Curated
What a 90s Commercial Break Understood About Attention
A Nickelodeon commercial-break animation from the 1990s. The craft in it was aimed at holding a child’s attention through patience and care, and it rewards watching the whole thing. Short-form feeds now cut every one to three seconds, which raises a question worth sitting with: what does that pace do to how young people focus, and what does it cost their mental health?
Via Rewind Network on TikTok
- Curated
The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Theme
The song that opened the Neighborhood, and the invitation it made every single time: would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you be my neighbor.
Via 2000s Kids theme song throwbacks on TikTok
- Curated
Have You Ever Done Anything Mean to Yourself?
Rogers opens with the hard case: the toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something mean to you, especially when that somebody has been yourself. He asks if you have ever done anything mean to yourself, then says to look inside and find the loving part, the part to take good care of and never be mean to, because it is the part that lets you love your neighbor, anyone you happen to be with at any time of your life. Respecting and loving your neighbor, he says, gives everybody a good feeling.
Via GBH on TikTok
- Curated
Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons Share the Water
Fred Rogers is cooling his feet in a wading pool on a hot day when Officer Clemmons comes by. Rogers asks him to sit down and share the water, and when Clemmons has no towel, Rogers offers his own. Given what public pools in this country meant about who was welcome in the water, making room on the edge of that one said more than a speech could have.
Via GBH on TikTok
- Curated
The Cardigan Was Strategy
A video essay arguing that Fred Rogers was doing something deliberate. A Presbyterian minister watched the country shredding children’s sense of their own worth and answered with a slow, quiet PBS show of fish tank songs and hand puppets. It walks the 1969 wading pool with Officer Clemmons, set against white families pouring acid into public pools to keep Black swimmers out, and notes that Clemmons was among the first openly gay Black men on television. It walks the six minutes of Senate testimony that turned a hardline senator and saved public broadcasting. The closing argument: gentleness is proof of strength.
Via Ashley on TikTok
- Curated
What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel
The words of his song about anger run as captions over decades of PBS KIDS — Daniel Tiger, Sesame Street, Arthur, Bill Nye, and Rogers himself at the piano with Yo-Yo Ma on cello. What do you do with the mad that you feel, when the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right? It is great to be able to stop when you have planned a thing that is wrong, and be able to do something else instead. It opens on the real footage: Rogers reciting those words to the United States Senate in 1969, the testimony that kept public broadcasting funded.
Via PBS on TikTok
- Curated
Mister Rogers Asks Yo-Yo Ma What He Plays When He Is Angry
Rogers asks whether, as a child, Yo-Yo Ma ever played happy things or sad things or angry things just because he wanted to. Ma answers by playing. The Swan for the peaceful, tranquil mood, and then the piece he gets into when the feeling is anger, digging in with all his strength until a lot of frustration is gone. Ma posted it forty years to the day after the episode first aired, thanking PBS for Fred’s vision and noting that three generations of his family grew up on it.
Via Yo-Yo Ma on TikTok
- Curated
You Will Always Have Them With You in Your Memory
When a bubble is gone you cannot see it with your eyes anymore, and when an opera is over you cannot hear it with your ears anymore. But you can remember. Rogers builds the idea out of the two smallest losses he can find, and once it is standing, lets it carry the one that is not small: what friends feel like, and that you will always have them with you in your memory. PBS KIDS shared it in remembrance of a mother’s love.
Via PBS KIDS on TikTok
- Curated
LeVar Burton and the First Reading Rainbow
Reading Rainbow began with an episode called “Tight Times.” LeVar Burton spent the years after it handing books to children and telling them the books were theirs. Literacy at HigherSelf traces to this work.
Via Buffalo Toronto Public Media on TikTok
- Curated
PBS Did Its Job
A voice actor’s list of what 90s PBS quietly installed in the children who watched it. A Jack Russell terrier taught you Faust and the Odyssey and Frankenstein before you were ten, so you recognize the manipulation when someone recycles it. LeVar Burton told you not to take his word for it, so you check sources and ask who funded the study. Mister Rogers talked to you about social issues as though you could handle the truth, so you do not need information wrapped in bubble wrap now. You spent childhood chasing a woman in a red trench coat across the globe on context clues, so you cannot watch anything without asking what they are not showing you. The verdict, delivered as a joke that is not entirely a joke: impossible to lie to, exhausting to watch movies with.
Via Tawny Platis on TikTok
- Curated
Why Kids Cannot Read in 2026
The literacy numbers are in the news, and this is an argument about what sits underneath them. Education has been defunded, and large technology companies have taken the classroom as a frontier for profit. The other half is what left: passive, freely available educational programming from the public sector. Cyberchase and WordGirl and Super Why gave way to Cocomelon and Paw Patrol, and the new shows are written down to children. The sharpest point is about why the old ones were good in the first place. Parents used to watch television alongside their kids, so a show had to work for the child and the adult at once, and that constraint is what made it worth watching.
Via Michael Fadugbagbe on TikTok
- Curated
“Black History/The World” — Gil Scott-Heron on Who Holds the Pen
Scott-Heron goes digging through the official version of Africa’s history and reads it back with the machinery showing. White folks discovered Africa and claimed it fair and square, so Cecil Rhodes could not have been robbing anybody, because there was nobody there. Then he follows the words as they move. Places once called underdeveloped are now called mineral rich. Egypt and Libya have been relocated to the Middle East. A people deciding to fight back gets filed as an attack. His close is the argument: if the interpreting were left to him, folks would know every time whose version they were getting. Which is why it is called his story.
Via Social Anatomy on TikTok
- Curated
What Gil Scott-Heron Meant by “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Gil Scott-Heron in 1989, on the line he is most quoted for and least understood on. The thing that is going to change people, he says, is something no one will ever be able to capture on film. You see it, and all of a sudden you realize you are on the wrong page, or on the right page and the wrong note, and you have to get in sync with everyone else to understand what is happening in this country. The revolution he meant happens inside a person, where no camera reaches.
Via Rock Hall on TikTok
- Curated
“The Bottle” — Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, 1974
From Winter in America on Strata-East. Brian Jackson’s flute carries a Caribbean groove that made it an underground hit and has been sampled more than seventy times since. The groove is doing work: it moves like a party record while the verses walk through the people the bottle took, one at a time, which is how it gets played in rooms that would never sit still for the subject stated plainly.
Via Jazz Is Dead on TikTok
- Curated
Dick Gregory: The Magic Glasses Come With Three Rules
What is dangerous, Gregory says, is when the universe picks you and you put on the magic glasses, because there are rules that come with them. You can never take them off. You stop seeing things the way they are supposed to be and start seeing them as they are. And you can never force anybody else to wear them. The clip cuts him over They Live, which ends on a six-minute alley fight between two friends over exactly that third rule.
Via Tupacabra on TikTok
- Curated
Danny Cochran Sang His Complaint to the City Council
A Vietnam veteran from Newcastle Pines took the public-comment microphone at a Shreveport city council meeting and played a song he had written, which was the complaint itself. Asked for his address for the record, he said it was on the music. The track names the problems: overgrown grass hiding ditches deep enough to take a pedestrian, streets cracking apart that need proper repairs rather than temporary patches, handicap ramps missing where nobody thought to look, appliances left in driveways on Earl Street, branches blocking the sightline onto Florence Lucas Road. The council heard all of it. “We didn’t get lost in the beat and the melody. We did hear the complaint. Forward it to us and we’ll go bar by bar, line by line.” One councilman said he would have handed over his own pulpit for it. Another said it was the first complaint he ever enjoyed.
Via Love Shreveport-Bossier on TikTok
- Curated
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and the Room That Played It
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, 1967 on Motown, one of four duets Ashford & Simpson wrote for them. What the clip is really about is the room. It names the Funk Brothers who cut it in Detroit, player by player and instrument by instrument: James Jamerson on a 1961 Fender Precision, Robert White and Joe Messina on guitars, Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones on drums, Jack Ashford on tambourine, Jack Brokensha on glockenspiel, with Paul Riser’s arrangements carried by the Detroit Symphony. The names almost nobody learned, on a record almost everybody knows by heart.
Via Joe Chiari on TikTok
- Curated
Geometry of Circles — the Sesame Street Animation Philip Glass Scored
Six colored circles split apart and reform into geometric patterns, set to music Philip Glass wrote in 1979 after animator Cathryn Aison commissioned him from her storyboard. It was made as a primer for visual thinking, and it scans like the Dance numbers he was writing around Einstein on the Beach at the time. Sesame Street put minimalist composition in front of children on a weekday afternoon and trusted them with it. It later hung in the Museum of Modern Art.
Via sir_moose_a_lot on TikTok
- Curated
A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter
A mother sends her daughter to the store and offers to write the list down. The girl says she does not need it: I remember. Then she walks the block holding the three items in her head, loses them at the counter, gets them back, and comes home saying it again. The sketch is doing something quieter than a memory drill. It hands a Black girl the whole segment, lets her be competent in it, and ends with her mother telling her she has a good memory.
Via sir_moose_a_lot on TikTok
- Curated
Everybody Sleeps
Footage of animals asleep, one after another, a camel lying flat in the dirt with its head down. No lesson is stated and none needs to be. Everybody sleeps, so whatever else is true of you, that much is shared with a camel.
Via LittleJerryFan92 on YouTube
- Curated
They’re Not Alive
A girl works through what is alive and what is not, outdoors, holding a rock in one hand and a twig in the other and sorting the world into the two piles. It is the first cut a person ever makes in biology, handed to a child young enough to still be deciding what counts.
Via sesamestreet66 on YouTube
- Curated
The Power Is Yours
Five kids, five rings — earth, fire, wind, water, and heart — and when their powers combine they summon a hero who is the planet standing up for itself. Captain Planet ran from 1990 to 1996 and gave a generation villains it could name: pollution, poaching, clear-cutting, waste. What it refused to do was let the hero keep the win — every episode closed with Captain Planet handing the fight back to the children watching: “The Power Is Yours.” That line is the whole idea of environmental education in four words — the planet’s condition is not someone else’s job.
Via nestalgiarecall on TikTok
- Curated
Greening the Ghetto
Majora Carter tells how the South Bronx — her home — came to handle more than 40 percent of New York City’s commercial waste: four power plants, a sewage plant, 60,000 diesel-truck trips a week, and one of the lowest ratios of parkland to people in the city. Her argument is the one environmental education keeps arriving at — the places asked to breathe the most are the places with the least power to refuse, and fixing that is justice, not charity. She began by turning an illegal dump on the Bronx River into a park.
Via TED on YouTube
- Curated
Climate Change 101
Bill Nye lays out the basics without the noise: the planet has warmed more than a degree in the last century, 97 percent of climate scientists agree the cause this time is human, and the greenhouse gases behind it come from how we now live. It is the plain-language version of what Captain Planet dramatized — the mechanism, named, for anyone still deciding whether the problem is real.
Via National Geographic on YouTube
- Curated
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Nina Simone tells the story before she plays it: an article in the New York Times about Lorraine Hansberry and the play made from her words, a photograph that would not let her go, and the phrase that arrived like a light — to be young, gifted and black. She wrote it as an anthem for Black children, and it has been one ever since. Sung here by the woman who made it.
Via Nina Simone on YouTube
- Curated
You Are Special
Fred Rogers feeds his fish and sings the plainest promise television ever made: you are special, there is only one like you in this whole world. Then he says the thing underneath it — it is not so much what we have in this life that matters, but what we do with what we have — and turns the alphabet into the only two words he says are worth making: friend, and love.
Via Houston Public Media on YouTube