Goodbye to Reading Rainbow
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I learned of this from Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post, who heard about it on NPR. Reading Rainbow simply couldn’t raise the money for its broadcast rights. One reason: an emphasis on reading how-tos, like phonics and spelling.
I can’t argue with that. I teach journalism, and let me tell you, youngsters simply can’t write. I’m convinced it’s because they don’t read. That’s why Reading Rainbow is so necessary. It promotes the pleasure of reading. As esajudita commented in the Post, knowing how to read is worthless if a person doesn’t want to do it.
“This is a deplorable development; while teaching kids how to read is important, teaching kids to love to read is even more important,” she wrote. “Too many Americans these days know how to read but claim not to like reading; instead, they melt their brains on television and video games.”
Researchers have a name for that: aliteracy. They’ve tracked the trend for more than a decade. Check out this article, “Aliteracy among College Students: Why Don’t They Read” (ED410527) from the Education Resource Information Center’s site.
The NEA also sounded an alarm about 5 years ago, in Reading at Risk a report with a title that paraphrased the infamous “A Nation at Risk” report from 1983. The NEA report found that American simply weren’t reading, unless we had to. Researchers concluded:
Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey released today. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline – 28 percent – occurring in the youngest age groups….By age, the three youngest groups saw the steepest drops, but literary reading declined among all age groups. The rate of decline for the youngest adults, those aged 18 to 24, was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population.
Canceling a show like Reading Rainbow seem ill-advised, especially after a 26-year run. It shows all we really value is the mechanics of reading, not the practice of it.
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Ms. Scruggs,
I have come to the conclusion that writing a cogent paragraph is a really difficult task for most people. My sister teaches high school and wife teaches college, I have two brother-in-laws who teach, and I used to teach eighth grade. I do not believe that literacy or reading has actually declined. What I believe is that the US economy has a very high demand for jobs where literacy is critical, much higher than in the past, even just one generation ago. The percentage of high school graduates attending college has never been higher. As a result, in the past, if a significant number of people could not write a paragraph that anyone else could read and understand, it was not always readily apparent. However now, such shortcomings cannot be missed. One of my brother-in-laws teaches basic English to police, parole, and probation officers (as well other government professionals) all over the state. He is in demand because these officials cannot write intelligible reports. All of these individuals are not stupid and most ,if no all, graduated from college.
The problem that these people has is not that they are illiterate, it is that they are poor writers. I really believe that the problem is not that people cannot read, or even do not read, it is that writing is really an entirely different skill from reading that many people who might read quite well find extremely difficult write well.
I am sad reading rainbow is being canceled, it was a good show, but the problem you outline has not been and would not be solved by this show. Maybe if it were the Writing Rainbow it would be different.
David, You’re right, reading and writing are different skills, but they’re related. I promote reading because it can help you recognize good writing. It also fosters familiarity with sentence structure, the functions of different parts of speech and the difference between spoken speech and written speech.
Many of my students write like they talk, and they don’t understand why that style of speech doesn’t work on the page. (After all, it works in email, Facebook and texting doesn’t it?)