After 26 years of helping children discover the joy of reading, PBS’ “Reading Rainbow” came to an end last Friday.
The show, hosted by actor LeVar Burton, was unable to secure a sponsor to underwrite the cost of producing and airing the show on PBS, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Pointing to changes in educational programming funding, John Grant, chief content officer at the program’s home station, said that the Department of Education and PBS are spending more money on teaching kids how to read, not on teaching them to savor the act itself. But the delights of “Reading Rainbow” stemmed directly from this premise – that kids could lose themselves in magical worlds just by turning a page.
Host Levar Burton hasn’t yet tweeted about it, but dismayed fans have already coined the Twitter hashtag #savereadingrainbow.
