Shame of Shames: Reading Rainbow’s a Wrap
- Posted by: Siobhan O'Connor
- on August 28, 2009 at 8:54 am
We should all feel a little gross about this: After a 26-year run, Reading Rainbow is done because nobody will pony up the dough to renew the broadcast rights. It’s partially due to a funding crunch, reports NPR, and due to a “shift in the philosophy of educational television programming,” that started under Bush. So you can file this as another damning piece of that administration’s legacy.
That shift, it seems, has to do with how we teach kids to read—focusing more on the mechanics of reading and (ugh) phonics. Thing is, Reading Rainbow was not designed to teach kids how to read, the same way we don’t rely on Sesame Street to teach us how to count to 10, or what the difference between “near” and “far” is. (Thanks, though, Grover.) It’s about creating a love of learning, and imbuing that learning with the playfulness that gets kids excited.
Indeed, the show, which won more than two dozen Emmys, didn’t teach hard skills. It taught kids to love books, and, in the words of John Grant, the Reading Rainbow’s home station WNED Buffalo: “Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read.”
I’m holding some hope for a last-ditch save.
R.I.P., for now.
DISCUSSION: 8 Comments
This is a damn shame. Reading Rainbow pretty much single-handedly instilled in me the love of reading. After every episode, I pretty much begged my parents to take me to the local library. What use is knowing HOW to read if kids don’t WANT to read?
The end of an era.
Phonics are far from “ugh”, just as Reading Rainbow is far from “ugh.” I learned to read via phonics, and am so grateful! It has always, even as a child, given me a sense of power and accomplishment to be able to sound out most words, even those which I’ve never read before, and have a pretty good idea of how to say them. A smattering of Latin and Greek in early high school now allow me to simultaneously look at the roots of these unfamiliar words and get grasp on what they probably mean.Phonics = power. We reduce reading to memorization of familiar words, rather than a true skill, when we teach methods such as sight reading. No wonder so few children truly love to read – it’s too discouraging to sit down with a book and be confronted with unfamiliar patterns of letters. Don’t put the cart before the horse here. It is not that children will stop loving to read because programs like RR are disappearing. Rather, Reading Rainbow is gone because we have not taught entire generations of children the skills they need in order to love reading.
Don’t hate me…I always thought it was a little ironic watching a tv show to get excited about books. Not saying it doesn’t work, just ironic. I’m a mom and I love RR and LeVar Burton!!!! But what I love even more is feeling the weight of my child on my lap, the smell of library books and seeing his imagination ignite. Our modern institutional k-12 school system is designed to produce worker bees, not inventors, explorers or dreamers…who again, quite ironically, are the people who fill our history books.
New rule:You can’t complain about this unless you’ve donated at least 50 bucks a year to your local Public Broadcasting station.Nostalgia is great and all, but don’t expect nostalgia to pay the bills.
Good point, toekneebullard.
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Thank you, engineerchick. I, too, learned to read phonetically, and agree that with a little knowledge of Latin (I’m sure that German would be helpful too) a phonetic reader can figure out the meaning of just about any word.And toekneebullard’s suggested donation of $50/year is actually rather frugal, at a mere $4.16/month, or less than $0.14/day.And yes, I, too am saddened by the end of Reading Rainbow. And by the end of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Hell, the end of Captain Kangaroo was lame too. And 3-2-1 Contact…and Buck Rodgers…ahhhh, nostalgia…