It's true. I've never really had cable - did TLC ever really stand for "The Learning Channel"?
Yeapers. Early History We would watch NASA stuff and surgeries and nature programming and they would run a special on a National Park once a week. TLC was aimed at giving students in schools access to knowledge from the wider world that they may not have normally known existed. I watched the first shuttle launch, live, on TLC in 1981 in high school. And now its crap.
It showed video of surgical procedures in the early-mid nineties. They kinda started to slide first with a bunch of documentaries about sex. Which were pretty awesome by the standards of a teenaged boy. I remember Desmond Morris documentaries around the same time. The sex documentaries were actually good, I think the had an expert in the field there too. Then outta nowhere, Junkyard Wars and Monster Garage filled the channel 24/7. You can chart the decline from Monster Garage to the motorcycle family show to everything else. It's like mitochodrial eve for bad reality TV on channels dedicated to learning. As long as I'm remembering old shows from these channels, History's Lost and Found was Here's a YouTube playlist of segments from it: It's so good it's narrated by the head vampire from Lost Boys