Today, PBS aired the final new episode of Reading Rainbow, the Lavar Burton show that aimed to impart a love of reading to young children. My reaction upon hearing this news was fourfold, and can be adequately expressed using the emoticons that come with this blog platform:
1) Reading Rainbow was still on? (Yep--and had been running for twenty six years!)
2) That sucks that they cancelled it.
3) What was that song again? Butterfly in the sky...I can fly twice as high...take a look...it's in a book...a reading rainbow...
4) Oh well, I guess it had to end sometime.
But then I read why they cancelled it. 
.
According to this NPR report, the triumverate that funded Reading Rainbow--PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the US Department of Education--decided that spending money on a show that attempts to impart a love of reading was no longer a good investment. Instead, these entities wanted to shift their entire focus to basic reading skills, like phonics and spelling instruction.
Now, phonics and spelling are clearly necessary components in training literate kids. But ultimately, we also need to teach kids to want to read. After all, if we only teach kids about the basic mechanics of reading, what on earth is going to make them want to pick up a book on their own? Few people read just because they are technically able to recognize phonetical sounds. They read because they want to know about interesting stuff. Reading Rainbow was great because it consistently let children know that incredible adventures awaited them in books.
Maybe Reading Rainbow's time was up anyway--I'm not sure how well today's kids were responding to Geordi La Forge telling them about books. But the wholesale rejection of the concept that we should teach kids to love reading is disturbing and, in my view, entirely wrong-headed.
But you don't have to take my word for it....