only by accident . . .

. . . was my attention drawn to this. Yes, sure, I noticed a mention in avengangle's blog but, as the program concerned had never meant anything to me (what with my having been brought up in a foreign country where, doncha know, jackbooted NHS feminazis eradicate all who would resist their sadistic whims), I didn't react. Now, though, because my tame Google Alerts thought the article was about moi, I've learnt more:

Did you hear the news? The Rainbow has evaporated. The oil slick it shimmered on has dried up into the concrete. No more butterfly. No more LeVar Burton. No more storybooks and pan-and-scan illustrations on PBS. Didn't you hear? The money is in CGI. The money is in math, computers, and phonics.

They ceased producing new episodes of Reading Rainbow in 2006 and now the show has been canceled completely, airing its last episode yesterday. The show will have no replacement, neither functionally nor philosophically, and this is an intentional government policy. The show has been taken off the air for political reasons. For educational reasons.

Here's NPR interviewing PBS content director John Grant, who explains why Reading Rainbow is going off the air:

"The show's run is ending, Grant explains, because no one – not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights.

"Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading – like phonics and spelling.

All of which really means that the Bush Administration's education gurus must have been completely fucking stupid, and if the Obama Administration's equivalents aren't reversing the policy fast then they're just as bad. Yes, some kids require phonics and spelling, and who would deny that their school education should include this. But I know -- from my own childhood, and from watching my kid when she was small, and from a zillion other sources -- that what makes kids learn to read is realizing, by observation, what fun reading is.

Ideally, what gets the message through is that the child's parents are constantly wrapped round yummy books, but we have to recognize there are far too many homes in which that ain't gonna happen. So one of several next best things is a tv program promoting reading as fun.

And now kids don't have that any more.

Good move, PBS. Good move, US.