With that said, I miss the trend of reading being so heavily emphasized in youth culture. Dolly Parton, free Pizza Hut, the accelerated reader program. I'm really grateful I grew up in the 90s.
Wishbone was a good show, but I think it occupies a different niche. Wishbone was about adapting the classics, and each episode was more of a production vs Reading Rainbow, which was formatted more to introduce kids to contemporary age-appropriate reading by focusing on picture books and excursions to thematically connected places.
The only downside is that Wishbone holds up better to a modern rewatch in comparison, as opposed to how RR is very much of its time. But that's ok, too; someone needs to inspire kids to be adventurous with their reading so that they can go out and find the next classics.
The Christian library one town over from where we live does a "reading summer" event every year for the school holidays: kids who borrow books, read them, and write a small book report (2-3 sentences) for them enter a lottery and can win a small prize at the end of the holidays. And I believe every participants gets a certificate also.
You'd think that this would not appeal to anyone, but they actually have a great turnout every year. Quite amazing actually.
Our local library had a summer reading program. You needed to talk about the book to a librarian, so we were waiting in line. The kid giving the book report was under 3 so it wasn't much of a book report, she asked the usual questions including "what was your favorite part of the book?"
The book the kid had read was Dinosailors which is about some dinosaurs who go on a sailing trip. The memorable part of the book is the page with no words that's just the dinosaurs throwing up because they all got seasick.
So, the non-verbal child happily reenacted their favorite part of the book.
There's something beautiful about the kid using performance as language. They've hit upon the greater truth that reading and speech are important because text and the spoken word are powerful mediums, but what truly matters is what they allow us to express to each other.
Though I have worked with children enough to sympathize with the not-beautiful part of this story too. (also that book sounds rad as hell.)
I had totally forgotten about this program. And it's still around https://www.bookitprogram.com/ though I've not seen any mention of it where I live (rural Virginia). I may have to start promoting it if the area restaurant is participating.
The Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza has about 600 calories in it. Maybe slightly indulgent, but that is a very reasonable reward and trade off for getting kids to read more.
People troll too much with their low effort comments. The thing was tiny, but it was a cool reward as a kid. I may be mistaekn but there was a limit too, it was either one per week or once a month.
I wasn't trolling. It was just an attempt to highlight something.
this is a conversation about habit building.
Do you think that pizza hut was doing this because of their love of reading?
Is eating pizza regularly the good habit to build? Is using food as a reward a good habit? It's not good to associate eating foods with that elation that a child gets when they "win the prize" -- that's how people have issues later when their brain associates the two states.
> Do you think that pizza hut was doing this because of their love of reading?
Probably not; they really just wanted to make sure they didn't get out pizzaed.
> Is eating pizza regularly the good habit to build?
Pizza is a fairly balanced food, depending on toppings. Generally some protein, some vegetables. Macronutrient wise, it's a bit carb heavy, but not overwhelmingly so. Usually not a lot of added sugar, unless you're having a BBQ pizza, and not that much natural sugar either; some places might put more sugar into the pizza sauce though.
> Is using food as a reward a good habit?
No, probably not. But free food is a pretty effective motivator, so people use it.
> Pizza is a fairly balanced food, depending on toppings. Generally some protein, some vegetables. Macronutrient wise, it's a bit carb heavy, but not overwhelmingly so. Usually not a lot of added sugar, unless you're having a BBQ pizza, and not that much natural sugar either; some places might put more sugar into the pizza sauce though.
Just because there's comparatively little sugar in pizza, does not make it a fairly balanced food. It's high in fat and consequently high in calories. Case in point: that personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut is the size of a man's palm and has around 600 calories. 600! For a young child, that tiny thing alone is a third of the total recommended [1] daily calory intake. My son is 10, and he could probably eat 4 or 5 of these suckers easily.
Taking data from Pizza Hut [1], per Pepperoni - Personal Pan Pizza® Slice, there are 7 grams fat, 17 grams carbohydrates, 6 grams protein. Per slice is kind of silly, but we can analyze balance regardless. I picked Pepperoni based on perceived popularity, not to cherry pick.
At standard ratios [2], that's 63 kcal from fat, 68 from carbs, 24 from protein. Or
41% fat, 44% carb, 15% protein. Your resource suggests 25-35% calories from fat, so it's not that far off the goal. I'm not saying it's well balanced, just that it's fairly balanced.
> For a young child, that tiny thing alone is a third of the total recommended daily calory intake.
A third of the total recommended intake sounds appropriate for a meal?
> My son is 10, and he could probably eat 4 or 5 of these suckers easily.
Ok, but he's got to read 4 or 5 books for that, and maybe over several weeks? I'm not really sure how to address this. If you are going to eat 4 complete personal pizzas if available, then you probably should avoid them.
I know you're writing this in good faith, and please understand that I'm doing the same.
> A third of the total recommended intake sounds appropriate for a meal?
Only superficially, I think. First, this pizza can hardly be considered "a meal" because it's too small to be filling. That's why I pointed out that even a 10-year old will probably not be satiated by just one such pizza.
But also, a third of your daily calorie budget allocated to just the food part of one meal assumes the classic model of three meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) - but beware that many people take in additional calories via inbetween snacks (esp. kids).
Also, the pizza only accounts for the food part of that meal - so you better be drinking just water along with it. Except that most kids don't. [1] So, it's a bit of a fallacy to assume that a third of your recommended daily intake of calories is what can be alloted to the food part of a single meal. It might be okay, but like I hopefully was able to highlight, it's easy to undercount because of other factors such as snacks and drinks.
Also note that food labels are not super accurate [2], and of course it's in any junk food company's interest to make their meals look better than they actually might be.
> Ok, but he's got to read 4 or 5 books for that, and maybe over several weeks? I'm not really sure how to address this. If you are going to eat 4 complete personal pizzas if available, then you probably should avoid them.
Agreed. Let's keep in mind that these are not full sized pizzas, and my son is very active (and slim). But the problem is that highly palatable foods like pizza are just so damn hard to avoid in practice. It's too easy (and enjoyable!) to overeat on them.
I would argue that those of us raised in the 80's turned out on average significantly better than today's crop of kids who are taught to fear everything and/or treat everything with drugs.
It's not that people troll too much with low effort comments.
It's that low effort comments are followed by troll-lighting the original commenter as the troll, downvoting their post, upvoting ones own. That is - often the biggest troll in the room is the one accusing others of trolling.
And it was a brilliant marketing gimmick too. The kid would need their family to bring them, and siblings & parents would probably pick up some drinks (fountain drinks are what, 90% margin?) or their own food that they might not have otherwise ordered out that night.
+1 this was a really neat carrot. In retrospect I am thankful for these carrots as they boost curiosity and self-learning, without much harm. People are going to eat out anyhow, what's the harm in marketing that also supports good behavior?
As a yuth in the East Bay my Alameda Co. library had a summer reading program with a treasure map. For each book you read, you got a stamp on the map. Then at the end there was a forgettable prize, though, after 45 years I’ve not forgotten the journey.
I miss our east bay library. Not saying other places aren’t good, but that’s where we were when our kids were little and the staff was just so amazing.
My local library still does Summer reading programs for both adults and kids. My teacher spouse does the adult one since she has a lot of free time in the Summer. She gets at least one gift basket each Summer that includes a $25 gift card to a local restaurant, as I'm pretty sure its just her and maybe 2 other adults doing it.
Idk read a book and do homework to get a chance to win a small thing during your summer break? That would’ve been a hard sell to me as a kid. I’m glad to hear that my skepticism about such a program is wrong though!
Primary school kids in Switzerland used to (and maybe they still do) run class-wide "competitions" on the points earned on a similar reading challenge - Antolin if I remember correctly and my kid was quite in for it.
We had something like this in our school called Accelerated Reader. Read books answer a quiz on it get points, best class/student got rewarded.
Was really easy to game though. Our school library had a selection of books for what I can only assume were for special needs kids, really really simple books very few words with even fewer pages. These books rewarded an appropriate amount of points however so you got less, but you could easily bang out 20 of those books in one class and get a lot more points than you'd be rewarded for reading a real book.
A few of us would just go over grab a bunch of those books and read through them in like 2 minutes and complete the quiz.
They ended up not letting those books get used for AR
We had Accelerated Reader in my public school in Texas in the early 2000s.
It was a pretty cool system.
The lottery system described upstream is terrible.
But with Accelerated Reader you would accumulate points that you could spend on things like the Scholastic Book Fair (buy books), slices of pizza for lunch, and various toy gadgets. Sometimes a teacher would sell some gimmick like a get out of homework ticket.
Of course, you'd have to read a good number of books to receive any of these prizes. But you were always working towards something unlike a lottery system which isn't motivating at all.
My friend group got busted for gaming AR and we were banned from it. The interface allowed us to sort the books by points, so we took the top 10 books, split them up among us, summarized them, took the tests, and gave each other the answers. The jig was up when they printed a leaderboard and we were all way ahead with an absurd number of points. They took them all away and we weren’t allowed to participate anymore.
I gamed AR in the early '90s when it was much simpler. I was in elementary school, and they counted a book as a certain number of pages read (as certified by a parent), the multiple of which increased as you grade number increased. So in third grade every 30 pages counted as a book. So I read my family's complete collection of Dr. Seuss books, as well as my own, like the Boxcar Children. By the end of the program I'd read "93" books.
Cool. Although my gut reaction would be that this mostly incentives the kids who already enjoy reading to read more, while the ones who are not great at reading know that they don't have a chance, so perhaps are discouraged from reading even more?!
As yes, my school in the US did that (sporadically) and awarded medals based on tiers. I remember thinking the silver one looked the nicer, and so was careful not to read too much over the summer.
If you want to go back to the medieval patronage model, that's certainly a possibility. There were good reasons for moving away from that model, though.
$9B?!
Path to everything being private. Don't they want to also break up NOAA and National Weather to make them basically just data services? Private companies would then be the ones to publish it. Want to know the weather? Subscribe.
These services are irreplaceable. once they are gone, they are gone.
as for NOAA, China could decide to undermine the profiteering of weather in the US (as it did with AI using DeepSeek) by simply expanding the Fengyun satellite constellation to cover the globe (as it did with beidou) thereby providing weather forecasts for North America as well via the web, social media, and mobile app free of charge as a form of Kissinger style "soft power."
Didn't you hear? Sesame Street is old hat. The new way to have kids learn stuff is with Little Beasts, a Mr. Beast YouTube series brought to you by Prime Energy and Feastibles.
They aren't breaking up NOAA just for the sake of privatization, reliable weather reporting also makes it harder to ignore Climate Change.
From Project 2025 "[NOAA offices] form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity."
> main drivers of the climate change alarm industry
This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates? What's their main source of income, who benefits from it, and how? And what is the supposed goal of it?
Raising the alarm about a conceieved threat could be a way to raise money for more research, which might indirectly benefit those scientists. But we haven't really seen a corresponding massive increase in scientists employed, and even if we did, they would have to find some way to leak money through publicly funded research to their own private enterprises because so far no one has suggested that we pay scientific researchers too much. The way to combat that would be to demand more transparency from universities, but they're already pretty good about that.
It also doesn't match very well what those scientists are actually saying. Which is mostly that the basic science is indisputable since the past century and more research is not required but action. Had the climate scientists been siphoning public money through alarmists schemes, wouldn't they rather say that things are very dire but "don't touch! We need much more expensive research before we can give any concrete advice"?
I don't think the allegation is that the scientists themselves are who benefits.
Rather, I think the allegation is that it's those involved in renewable energy development schemes that result from the raised alarm, from product vendors to site developers to construction contractors to energy trading firms to... See also: politicians pushing Green New Deal type policies. The scientists are enablers, not the primary beneficiaries, at least as I understand the allegations.
That's a real issue with several real life examples, but not really related to the issue of climate change or climate alarmism, is it?
There's been plenty of extended circles around political interests that has lined their pockets in matters of alcohol and drug prevention, abuse prevention and health care, but very few people seem to be taking the local step to actually, alcohol are good for you and anyone that says otherwise should be labelled alcohol alarmists. It's pretty unique to climate research.
I seem to remember that there were was a enormous backlash against CFC bans, and lots of talk about how it would lead to the spread of preventable illness and economic disaster, but it never reached nearly the same levels of anti scientific discourse as we see today.
>This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates?
It's clearly just dismissive language that doesn't have to make sense. The only purpose is to make climate change seem like a fake concept thought of by groups with nefarious intentions. It's like asking the author of a short story what the main character's favorite color is. That detail simply wasn't considered because it's not needed in the short story.
Gonna make one of those novelty clocks themed around the financial boom-bust cycle, where, to silence it, you have to get out of bed and literally kick a can.
Back in the 90's and 00's, PBS had a show called "Irasshai" [1] aimed at high school students. It was a complete two year Japanese language education class filmed in conjunction with Georgia Tech.
They produced 140 30-minute lessons and produced two 500 page text books and teacher lesson plans. Study materials, homework, tests - everything.
It typically aired at 4 AM, so they asked you to set your VCR to record. If you couldn't do that, they could mail you the entire VHS boxed set of episodes.
But that's not the cool and powerful part. They actually let you register for classes and conference call in with an actual teacher. Twice to three times a week with class sizes of 4-6 students. Everyone took turns reading, answering questions, practicing dialogue. All year long.
There were tests and grades, and regular 1-1 proctored verbal exams. It was incredible.
The entire program was offered for free.
It was one of the coolest ways to learn Japanese and it was incredibly effective. This was such an amazing program for high schools that typically only offered Spanish lessons.
Wow. I would've absolutely done that had I known about it. (I was in high school in the very late 2000s/early 2010s, so perhaps I was already too late, but yeah, wow.)
Thanks for that link though, a commenter says the vids are still there. (I'm too busy learning Chinese at this point though, I'm afraid!)
What is the case for funding this via a public television station instead of via schools? We already have infrastructure and a wider reach for education in schools? Wouldn't the money have been better served creating a Japanese language program in Georgia high schools?
This benefited interested people nationwide, not only in Georgia but certainly including Georgia, and without disrupting local school’s already tight budgets in ways that their local decision makers would find hard to afford.
The obvious thing to cut is the goddamn military. I’m not even talking about cutting things off to make the military weaker in a world that largely doesn’t need a powerful military. I’m talking about actual insane over spending.
But even Elon couldn’t do that. I don’t know if any president can. Something is deeply wrong here.
Wanting to reduce spending does not automatically mean reduced force capability, nor reduced deterrence.
The challenge is that the next war wont look like the last one or the one before that. So you might decide that instead of sinking a gazillion dollars on a 25-year project to build some fighter jets or littoral ships, you spend half a gazillion dollars on cyber and drones.
Problem is that states and their leaders (politicians, business, resident voices) find it emotionally and politically hard to pivot from building X in state A to building Y in state B.
Right now, everyone is studying the lessons of the Ukraine war. That certainly should be looked at and learned from (build drones at mass scale, say) but it would also be possible to draw entirely incorrect conclusions for the next war. As a land war in Europe, Ukraine shows us the importance of essentially 1900s-style tools: shells and ordnance by the million. Tanks. Etc. If (god forbid) someone got into a hot war with China, the needs would be entirely different.
It’s always tempting to look at the Russian assault on Ukraine and “learn lessons” but you also have to remember that NATO countries aren’t Ukraine and Russia isn’t China.
The use of drones by both sides is in part because neither side could get air superiority, Ukraine because it barely had an air force and Russia because..well decades of corruption.
If the US had invaded Ukraine, Ukraine would have lost in under a month, the insurgency would be horrific and make Iraq look mild but militarily Russia was a complete basket case.
The lesson we should take is that ammunition stockpiles evaporate faster than you expect always in a full scale war, this has been true all the way back to the invention of the bow though.
I don't disagree but clearly not what the op was trying to say.
To your points.
Isreal just leveled iran without a single plane shot down, tech still dominates. The F35 is a terrifying weapon and Irans drone and missle attacks were ineffective. Ukraine shows us what two poor and land locked countries fight like.
Part of that is because they can't trust the US, which outspends China 3x over and outspends Russia 7x over, and outspends dozens of other countries combined. The US is the biggest military threat the world has ever known, and our government is acting crazy right now. Nobody should trust the US, a single country with 37% of the world's entire military budget with only 4% of the people, that is ridiculous and dangerous.
The only reason for the US to continue its military spending is to enforce its will upon the world by force or going on conquests for land, neither of which is a good or righteous cause that nobody should be supporting.
It's not an unfair argument to say the US is a global superpower with questionable intent.
But it's not hard to prefer Pax Americana to WW3.
Super power gonna super power. Wether it is Romans/Arabs/British/US or maybe future China.
None of them play nice and there's generally always one. I'd prefer to live in the peak power of these countries over the total chaos in between their collapse. The entire world has gotten insanely rich and healthy under US dominance I don't think wanting that to continue is an immoral desire.
History will remember the US as the empire to bring about the modern era much like the british brought about industrialization and global trade.
Many countries that in actuality do not have nukes would have obtained nukes if the US hadn't made security guarantees to them. Those guarantees would not have been as persuasive (in getting countries to forgo getting nukes) if the US military wasn't as strong as it actually was. And the world is a safer place because only 9 countries have nukes.
Also, before now there's never has been an 80-year-long period without a major war between European powers. If the US military had been less strong, then the major powers of Europe would have felt the need to spend more on their militaries (at first to deter the Soviets / Russia, but then also to deter each other) which would have increased the probability of a war between European powers.
If I was in a country without nukes im not sure I would consider myself safer and would likely be an advocate for my government to gain nukes if there was any threat at all of someone attacking or invading in order to prevent it, especially if the US could be a potential enemy as only nukes would be an actual deterrent from meddling or invading.
The free world is under WW2 levels of threat? Listen to yourself. You’re brainwashed. Is China slaughtering Jews like the holocaust? Is China trying to wage war against the world and build an empire? Nobody actually wants war. In fact if war happens it will be the US getting into the whole Taiwan and China conflict that is none of its fucking business in the first place.
The world is building military defense against a threat that will never materialize. That’s one half the story. The other half of the story is a big economic dick measuring contest where the country with the most military might (that they will never use) is the better country.
China is rapidly building an army at a pace larger than germany or the US in WW2.
They actively threaten their neighbor and openly say force is being considered while also designing specialized equipment to enable this.
China actively is trying to expand territory and have plans to expand to the different island chains by certain years.
US military analyst have been warning for nearly a decade that china is planning for war between 2025-2030. All recent US actions under Biden and Trump both correlate with senior US officials taking this seriously.
Even JAPAN a openly pacifist country is increasing military spending. Europe just made a plan for like 800B$ of military spend.
Even a conservative viewer should see this as pretty clear sign that the world is preparing for war no?
I'm all for cutting the military spending to less than half... that said, it's still much smaller than entitlement spending at this point... there needs to be a lot of effort to reduce fraud and increase competition in medical/pharma space. Why there aren't licensing and dual sourcing requirements for medications is beyond me. Let alone allowing commercials that nowhere else in the world allows.
Pharma companies already aren't very profitable and it's getting worse and worse every year (called "Eroom's Law" for the reverse of Moore's).
The US's uniquely fucked healthcare situation is thanks to 1) administrative overhead of tons of competitive and extremely complex distinct health plans, and 2) the labor cost of doctors, much of which gets captured by the extremely consolidated health systems that employ them.
The US needs to dump money into training a lot more doctors. Not by subsidizing student loans, but by directly creating public medical schools that train doctors on the cheap and let them escape with no student debt.
Residency slots are not capped. Common misconception.
Private parties are welcome to create and fund residency slots if they want. They typically don’t because it’s a totally nonsense investment — perfect example of a problem that private investment markets would fail to solve.
The “cap” refers to the fact that CMS doesn’t fund an infinite number of residency slots.
So you and I are saying similar things, which is that the government needs to fund more MD training.
This article lavishes well-deserved praise on the intentions behind Reading Rainbow. I know I loved the show as a kid.
But it seems like childhood reading scores were pretty much flat between 1983 and 2006, when the show was on the air: they only varied by 10-15 points on a 500 point scale[1], and there was no clear upward trend, it just sort of fluctuated. Reading for pleasure has never been lower among kids, either[2]. It doesn't seem to me that the mission of the show was achieved, if the mission was to make children read more books, and understand them more.
Ultimately I think it ended up just being a pleasurable way to have kids get distracted by a friendly, positive TV show. My guess is that if you want to improve reading scores and habits, parents have to do more than just turn the dial to PBS.
It would be more relevant to look at reading scores for children who specifically tuned into Reading Rainbow. I suspect the number of viewers was a small fraction of all children in the US, in which case the show's ability to affect the nationwide reading scores would be low. In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
We'd also have to figure out whether children who already loved reading watched Reading Rainbow, or if children who hated reading started liking it after watching. Since nobody has that data, I'll go with the aggregate.
> In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
I don't think it conclusively proves anything, but I do think it supports a skeptical position. The article doesn't cite anything supporting the notion that Reading Rainbow improved childhood literacy, so I'm wondering if you take the position that it did—and if so, on what basis?
RR was swimming against a current; 83-06 (and even going back to the early 70s) would have been the first generation+ raised by the first generations raised by TV, or with a TV in the house. It was also the first generation with access to the internet during childhood and young adulthood. People waiting for the movie to come out instead of reading the novel, etc. Everything about the technological zeitgeist was selling Americans on the idea that books didn't matter. The question isn't whether RR raised reading scores, but whether it kept them above water. Your graphs can't tell us anything about which is the case, but considering the context shows us which question is actually interesting and which isn't.
You may be right, but we have no idea what the scores would have been had Reading Rainbow not been on (i.e., maybe it held off a decline), so this isn't really meaningful one way or the other.
They didn't start tracking in 1983, the numbers I linked start in 1971. The trend line is pretty much the same from 1971 to 1983 as it is from 1983 to 2006. In any case, a skeptical person would not look at that graph and say that there was a successful effort to improve childhood literacy represented on it.
It's true that we don't know the counterfactual: it's possible literacy would have plummeted precipitously starting in 1984 if Reading Rainbow hadn't been a bulwark. But I don't find that the most likely explanation, personally.
LeVar Burton hosted a podcast marketed for adults where he read short stories. Though it ended last year, there are almost 200 episodes in the archive.
He’s still been at work encouraging lifelong reading all these years later.
That was a well done show for kids. LeVar Burton can read a book better than me, and I am not ashamed to admit it. He made learning accessible, fun, and cool.
As a child in the late 80s/early 90s, I remember watching Star Trek TNG as new episodes were coming out, and also watching Reading Rainbow (I loved both shows).
Adults, too. I might not know what an inverse-tachyon pulse is, but thanks to his convincing demeanor I understand that it could cause a localized spatial distortion.
He’s a compelling speaker and onscreen talent, I agree. He’s using his superpowers for good, whatever they are. Being able to connect through a screen wasn’t normalized back then. Educational content needed that personal touch. I think it makes all the difference.
Whatever works, I guess. It made a difference, although it was corny somewhere between `Punky Brewster` and `Captain Planet`. Vintage `Sesame Street` is legit cool.
He makes the hard thing look easy. This wasn’t a backhanded compliment but a genuine one. He isn’t acting per se, but he does voice act the stories. It was audiobooks and ASMR sorta before those things were cool. He does a fantastic job with the words on the page and also goes on-site to film IRL things from the books. It’s a simple premise and it works. It doesn’t have to be surprising to be enjoyable and engaging.
Why are you looking for a hyper stimulus? Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
If child requires hyper stimulus to be engaged in this area, suspect other hyper stimulus present.
> Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
The stories we grew up to were indeed those which won "a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability". Only interesting stories got retold. Stories travelled further when made into songs. They became artworks when tranformed into plays. They became myths and legends in the luggage of those travelling the planet. And the art of telling stories also became a way of making a living much before our contemporary society produced the first pop star.
> Why are you looking for a hyper stimulus? Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
> If child requires hyper stimulus to be engaged in this area, suspect other hyper stimulus present.
Reading Rainbow is the opposite of a hyperstimulus compared to most tv programs, let alone “educational” tv programming.
I wasn’t seeking a hyperstimulus. You don’t even know me. I could read and write before kindergarten, which was my first schooling outside the home.
Modern media is so replete with hyper stimuli that it is often hard to see where the line is between what is evolutionarily congruent and what is greater.
I don’t see how knowing you is relevant. This is my position on what most people do. Either you have a different viewpoint on this than the mainstream and yet arrived at the very same conclusions, or I essentially am familiar with your viewpoint in this area. What have I gotten wrong?
I was bored to tears and I read more than the average kid. I liked the aesthetic though and I wanted to like it because it seemed wholesome. I’ve always suspected RR is one of those shows that everyone knows they should like so they all talk it up as if they did like it. Kinda like Rust.
Or maybe many did genuinely enjoy RR but you just weren’t the target audience? If it was created to combat the summer reading slump, it likely wasn’t targeting already avid readers.
FWIW, though, my experience was similar to yours: I read a ton and loved the feel of the show, but the actual content was a little slow.
I agree that it’s the feel of the show. I grew up with 3 free to air channels, and one of them was a PBS station. The content was better than the competition or the VHS tape collection, or replaying one of the video games.
I genuinely liked it even though I could read fine. It was an excuse to use the tv when I might not have a good reason to use it instead of someone else otherwise and I enjoyed the content well enough even if I was a couple years older than the intended audience. The public broadcasting shows of that era were weirdly good imo, with Mr Rogers and Shirley Lewis doing puppets, but wholesome too.
Ghost Writer was ahead of its time and deserves a post of its own.
> The series revolves around a multiethnic group of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of youth detectives with the help of a ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with children only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and using them to form words and sentences.
> Ghostwriter producer and writer Kermit Frazier revealed in a 2010 interview that Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the American Civil War. He taught other slaves how to read and write and was killed by slave catchers and their dogs. His spirit was kept in the book that Jamal discovers and opens in the pilot episode, freeing the ghost.
Wishbone has costumes and a dog for your dramatic re-enactments of books with a dog actor in the lead role. This is crazy town, and I’m here for it.
The entire PBS slate of shows was elite. Very little did I know at the time how initiative-driven it was (a great thing). To me where in the world was Carmen Sandiego was a fun trivia game. To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map.
"To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map."
This is a very glib take. The origin of the series was a 1985 educational computer game from Broderbund. The target age group wasn't expected to know all this information, which is why the game shipped with an almanac.
Not sure if it was on purpose but your take is the glib one.
“The show was created partially in response to the results of a National Geographic survey indicating little knowledge of geography among some of the American populace, with one in four being unable to locate the Soviet Union or the Pacific Ocean.”
Now of course the tv show is an offspring from the video game but it’s well documented that the specific format was to combat geography. So it’s a fine statement to state that is the purpose of the show creators as that was the mission from PBS at the time.
> To me where in the world was Carmen Sandiego was a fun trivia game. To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map.
Was there a show? To me Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was a reoccurring segment on a show called Square One. I liked it, but it didn't feel like it was the source of Carmen Sandiego mythology; it felt more like a minor epiphenomenon.
There was also a computer game, which I didn't play much of because it was a lot of work. It felt a lot more fully developed than the TV segments, though.
Yes, there was half-hour game show for kids that aired on PBS in the early 90s. For anyone who's ever seen it, chances are the theme song is permanently burned into their brain: Do it, Rockapella! [1]
The game came first, and the TV shows were spun off from it, which is probably why the game feels more fully developed. It grew into a whole media franchise -- there were Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? game shows on PBS, as well as a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? Saturday morning cartoon, and more recently, an animated series on Netflix. I don't remember there being Carmen Sandiego segments on Square One but I also don't remember Square One all that well in the first place.
Norway has gamified summer reading https://sommerles.no/svar
It's quite popular in the first half of elementary school.
You get points for registering read books (even if your parent read it for your, or audio books) and every week all the libraries put up a poster with this week's "code word" which you get points for typing into your profile, and whenever you level up ten levels you get a little prize you can pick up from the library (like a tiny toy, they had shark teeth one year)
I am not convinced that this is really motivating to kids. Don't they have tons' of toys at home an in the library to play with already. Why would they care about tiny shark teeth.
Also i find the whole concept of 'read to get prize' cynical, cheap and manipulative. Don't want to manipulate my own child with these cheap tricks.
Don’t underestimate the power of junk prizes. It’s how McDonald’s has gotten away with selling overpriced kids meals for decades.
My kids love the novelty of garbage prize toys and while I think they are stupid, my kids get weirdly motivated by the promise of a trip to the dollar store.
I had similar qualms, but after seeing the actual effects I've changed my mind, at least as regards Sommerles (I'm less positive to other forms of gamification, especially if they're considered an alternative to non-gamified learning instead of a minor supplement in a well-rounded system). We already have prizes and competitions and these external structures for sports and such. People send little kids into soccer tournaments, we just make sure the rules aren't too strictly enforced and the major part of the reward is for just playing.
I have a kid who loves listening to stories but isn't at all motivated to read alone – and probably would not have read a single book alone this summer if it wasn't for Sommerles. Maybe it's not motivating for all kids, but I'm sure happy it's helping my kid get some much-needed reading practice. I also think you underestimate children. My other kid, already a self-motivated reader, re-read short books really fast to get all possible prizes within the first week (librarian eyebrows were raised). Who was doing the manipulation here? :-)
manipulation or motivation? I suppose it's blurry.
But, I think the point is that once you get the kids into the habit (or help them build the skill) they'll maintain it later on. Even encouraging reading together has societal value.
So, maybe tiny shark teeth are good motivation - i have no idea. I'm not great at gauging what motivates kids. I still don't understand minecraft.
Do you have children? You tell them something is animal-related and they tend to get really excited. Even more so for dinosaurs. My five year old has no concept of money, but he does have a concept of “new thing I can play with”.
When I was a kid we had Book It. I got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut for every 10(?) books I read. I read a lot of books! I also learned a lot along the way, and continued the habit of reading for fun through college.
Read books, get free pizza you want, not the pizza they serve at school. Whoever invented this is a genius. I still regret losing the holographic Book It! pin I had, but I can probably find another one if I look.
It seems that Reagan was involved from very early, but Book It! was created by Pizza Hut folks:
> Book It! was conceived in 1984 during a dinner with Art Gunther, President of Pizza Hut, and Bud Gates, SVP of Marketing at Pizza Hut, as a way to help Gunther's son read more.
This is not at all to discount how Reagan championed Book It! specifically. He also worked on other literacy projects, and declared 1987 the Year of the Reader.
> Like many simple plans, this one was hard to realize. Beginning last January, Gunther met several times with Secretary of Education William Bennett, representatives of President Reagan’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiative, and teachers’ and school administrators’ groups. With input from the educators, Gunther and his associate Sharon Knight designed a program.
Considering how involved he was in the project and how early, I'm won't quibble on this point, since you said sort of invented. I don't see how it would have had the success it did without his involvement and efforts, but he didn't invent it strictly speaking.
We did Book It! for a couple of years, but Accelerated Reader for most of the others. One of my favorite childhood memories as a kid was having to go to the local junior high, because the elementary school didn't have the test for the books I was reading.
It also made me want to read Anna Karenina, because that was listed as the book with the highest points awarded. It only took me 30 years to get around to finishing it.
I wonder how many public libraries are there in US.
In Poland every gmina (which is like a collection of a few villages - around 10k people and 10x10 km) have a public library. It's how I learned to love reading books - there was no internet yet, TV had like 3 channels, and I was on vacations bored to hell. So I went to the library and started borrowing random books. I didn't had to drive anywhere or ask my parents - it was just a short walk.
I especially love the small countryside libraries where you don't need to ask the librarian for a book you want - you walk among the shelves and look for the books yourself. Back in 80s/90s most books in such libraries were hand-covered with gray packing-paper covers and had the author and title written by the librarian on that. So you didn't even had images on the cover to let you know what the book was about. It was a complete surprise every time. Through 3 summer vacations I went through half the library, even trying some Harlequins or "collected works of Lenin" :) (not a very good read BTW). Mostly I looked for fantasy and sci-fi, but that was like 5 shelves out of 50, so I tried everything eventually. And I learnt to love reading ever since.
The US public library system is very big. There are over 17,000 libraries and that doesn't include the almost 100,000 libraries that are in schools.
My city (Seattle, a pretty large US city) has 27 public libraries. I only live a few blocks from the closest one but could fairly easily walk to at least 2 more.
It doesn't seem like "A lot" for a country the size of US TBH.
Poland has 7541 public libraries. Which is 1 per 41 km^2, but of course big cities have many libraries, so the actual distance is larger in the countryside. But it's a number.
17000 libraries in US is like one per 580 km^2.
And yes every school has one too, there's 35 000 schools. But many of these are very small libraries that mostly carry mandatory lectures for school + some classic books. In my village the school library sucked.
I lived in a village of 500 people and had a library within 5 minute walk.
Going by land area isn't a great metric, since the US has a great deal of unpopulated or sparsely populated space. Per capita might be better, but not by much. But if you go "per city," the US has around 19,000 incorporated areas. So 17k libraries to 19k incorporated areas (cities, towns, villages, designated census areas, etc.), might be better metric.
There's a town near me that has a population of 1100 and a nice small library. And there's state-wide interlibrary loan, so small-town libraries can get you anything the bigger ones have.
I guess one needs to consider the US is geographically much larger and most land doesn't actually contain people. Considering the density is wiser, but even still. Libraries per occupied area still isn't a good metric. There is no good metric.
What's more important is the qualitative offerings and impact:
1. Spectrum of a. most common services and collections offered everywhere to b. the most comprehensive of those offered by a specific library.
2. What people can do at them: read, research subjects, borrow things, accomplish tasks, host meetings, etc.
This is very hard to measure and not something a business person running the government "like a business" would understand.
IMO the most important metric is "what percentage of kids can walk to a library without asking anybody".
But nowadays people have internet, so I guess it's not THAT important anymore. The ideal library is just a website that lets you download pirated ebooks for free.
The utility of the brick-and-mortar is that some/(many by state) libraries include services and physical items that can be checked out besides media. Plus, besides free Wi-Fi and meeting rooms, it's a non-consumption location to exist in a physical public space. There aren't many more free spaces in America. And, there are millions of people who can't afford internet, a tablet, a computer, or have a place for books. Millions of books and historical local newspapers don't exist in electronic form!
But no, really, (most of) America is truly unwalkable for almost any activity.
To build a library close enough to most American kids that they could walk to it would likely be infeasible, because so many people live places that are simply not walkable at all.
Can I walk a mile? Yes. Can I walk a mile from my house? Not safely.
There's a road I would have to walk down to get to anything that isn't on my street. One lane each way, no shoulders, no sidewalks, and very poor visibility of oncoming traffic due to an inconveniently placed hill.
The nearest public library to my childhood home was 2.2 miles; I would occasionally bike to it before I had a car, but it involved crossing one major street.
In the United States (in 2020[1]), 100% of the population lived within 5 miles (8 km) of a local public library, with 99.1% of people living within 1 mile (1.6 km). That seems good enough to me.
Could your whole village walk to a library in 5 minutes?
Regardless of population density, villages/towns/settlements/cities tend to span a mile or more, not one acre with 1-1000 people surrounded by non-residential space.
How many books were in that library that served 500 people?
There's 3 smaller daughter-libraries in nearby villages. I'd say 20 minutes walk to the nearest library for everybody in the whole gmina is realistic. Less if you include school libraries (but they suck).
I had no idea how many books, checked right now and apparently it's 32 000. It's not really serving 500 people, it's got 1100 regular readers. Which means people are going there from other villages.
It also has all the multimedia stuff, audiobooks, internet access, printers, etc.
Is gmena a typo or does Polish seriously have “gm” as a digraph? I have seen a reasonable amount of written Polish but I’ve never noticed “gm” before. That strikes me as really reaching, get a different alphabet, already.
"Gmina" is correct. It's the lowest administrative unit in Poland.
There's a few other words with "gm", like "gmerać" (to fiddle with sth), "gmin" (plebs, common people - same root word as gmina I'd imagine), "gmach" (a huge building, usually of some public institution).
It's not a digraph tho, it's just pronounced as "g" and then "m"?
I'm like 99% sure it's a German loanword. Most of city/administration/building language in Polish comes from German - dach (roof), szyba (glass pane), rynek (main market square), ratusz (city hall), burmistrz (city mayor), rynsztok (gutter), etc.
All through middle ages Poland imported lots of germanic settlers and had them build whole new towns from scratch in Poland in exchange for tax breaks. There's a town called "Niemcy" (Germans/Mutes) like 10 km from where I live :), and there's a village called "Dys" nearby.
What's the problem with using latin script for gm by the way?
As someone who speaks German but not Polish, “Gemeinde” was the first thing that came to mind seeing that “gmina” is a collection of rural villages, because that’s what the smallest incorporated settlements here are called (at least in Bavaria). Gemeinde -> Markt -> Stadt
English has fairly common words with "gm", just not at the beginning of words. Figma and enigma immediately spring to mind. I'd even argue that people say "Big Mac" roughly the same speed as the above words. Plus, there's even that meme word from a few years ago (like a crude, less punny version of the "updog" joke, if that helps narrow down what I mean)
This brought back some memories. It’s kind of amazing how shows like this made reading feel fun instead of something you had to do. Just stories, imagination and a bit of magic, sometimes that’s all it takes to get a kid hooked on books.
My mom read books during the day when my dad was at work. She'd tell my dad how hard she worked all day :-)
I'd look over her shoulder and wonder how she made any sense out of the page full of text, as there were no pictures. I was fascinated by that, and was well motivated to learn to read.
I was not allowed to watch TV beyond Daktari and Saturday morning cartoons. I hated that restriction, but in hindsight my parents made the right call. My dad would watch the news, but it was just gibberish to me.
Later, I was not allowed to watch Green Acres. My parents said it was "rubbish". I did not see an episode of it till I went to college, and eagerly watched to see what I had been missing. I lasted 10 minutes - it was indeed rubbish.
Ask a parent! Kids can be very wary of attempts to "shape" them. Of course they're not going to know the word propaganda, but the instinct to detect manipulation (and react negatively to it) goes deep.
Indeed. Also, small kids are excellent bullshit detectors. They can tell when they're being given non-sequiturs, or explanations are inconsistent, and they (rightfully) see this as problem and are confused when such things come from sources they trust (e.g. parents).
I am always fascinated by this degree of assurance and absolute lack of scepticism.
In what way, do you think, a show can have no room for critical viewing? Does being related to "reading or books" sufficient for such unquestionable and noncritical acceptance? Or was something else about it that makes it so cocksure good?
Watching Mr. Rogers as an adult, I was surprised by how opinionated the show could be. There was an episode where one of the puppets was trying to teach a child puppet to read before they entered school, and it was presented as a extremely harsh and mean way to treat a child. A human actor comes in and starts scolding the puppet that it's not necessary to teach the kids to read before school and that she needs to stop. Later, Mr. Rogers talks with an actual kindergarten teacher, and they discuss how it's completely unnecessary to teach kids to read before they enter kindergarten.
It felt like it was indoctrinating kids into believing that the right way to raise them was the way that Fred Rogers preferred.
There's this strange point of view that once it's decided that something is good and it's being made by good people, it's absurd to look at it critically and anyone who does should be mocked.
I think the one you are talking about is Episode 1462.
In Episode 1462 Lady Elaine is badgering people for not knowing all their letters and numbers etc before showing up for school.
The point is not about knowing them before you show up, the point is about addressing learning anxiety!
The point of that section is to tell children that if they don't know these things before they first show up at school, that it's not the end of the world!
Different kids are going to come from different backgrounds, this segment addresses that so when kids show up to school and don't know these things, that they don't feel stressed and upset that other kids may know something they don't. That is something they can turn a kid off from school and wanting to learn forever.
Were in a place where you learned things like that before you ever went to school? If so, that can cause resentment!
The episode only portrays education before school in a negative light, though. It's message isn't "it's fine to teach kids before they enter school and after they enter school, but you shouldn't badger them." Characters continually say that it's wrong to try to teach kids these things before they enter school, or that if a kid doesn't want to learn them before they enter school parents are wrong to try.
In 1462, look at around 12:30, Elaine is trying to teach Tuesday, who doesn't want to learn, he wants to leave. So Mr. McFeely objects by saying that Tuesday doesn't need to learn them before he goes to school.
Then look at 17:15. Elaine says that Tuesday needs to study, and Aberlin immediately objects saying that he hasn't started school yet. When Elaine says that school is about learning numbers and letters, Aberlin says that that's not true "according to the real teacher." Followed by Mr. Rogers saying that Elaine thinks that everything about school needs to be hard and boring, and that's just not the way it is. But "parents trying to teach you about numbers and letters just want things to be hard and boring" isn't a good message, to say the least.
You're right that Elaine is portrayed as being mean, but that's part of the problem. It feels very much like a negative caricature. No one is saying "here's a good way to teach kids before school," they're all saying "don't be so mean, they don't need to learn these things."
I don't feel so easy about a show teaching very young children that their preferred approach to child rearing is morally correct and other approaches are morally wrong.
(Thanks for a link to the episodes, by the way. 1462 and 1463.)
I think you're taking away a different message from what I did, I watch 1462 and 1463 looking for this section.
The message I got was not "don't learn this stuff before school", the message I took away was that, for a lot of kids watching that show on PBS, especially around the air date of 1979, you were looking at "latchkey kids" plus the incredible struggles of poverty and access to information.
It wasn't "don't learn this", it was "you are not less of a human being because you were born into a family that didn't or couldn't take the time to help teach you these things before you started school". That was the takeaway, for me, and for a lot of the kids I grew up around that weren't privileged.
But it's not showing that. You could have two kids start school at the same time and say that it's OK that they didn't have different backgrounds. But that's not what they showed - they're showing people who are telling Elaine it's wrong to teach the kids when the kids want to go off and play.
> "you are not less of a human being because you were born into a family that didn't or couldn't take the time to help teach you these things before you started school"
But Elaine does want to teach the kids in this episode. I don't see how this episode would do anything other than encourage fewer parents to try to teach their kids before they go off to school.
That is a Waldorf perspective, though presumably not exclusive to them. I was sent to a Waldorf kindergarten, and my mother despised it because they repeatedly insulted her for having taught me to read. They felt this was unhealthy.
Independent of Waldorf, kindergarten teachers - like most teachers - don't like it when their students already know the material they're supposed to be teaching.
> Independent of Waldorf, kindergarten teachers - like most teachers - don't like it when their students already know the material they're supposed to be teaching.
Yes, "don't do it that way, you're not suppose to know that yet" is depressingly common. Also unfair, since it usually only applies to certain kids - we don't tell artistic kids that they shouldn't paint so well, because kids aren't supposed to be at that level yet, nor do we tell athletic kids this. But it's extremely common in subjects like math.
One of the things that's frustrating is the one size fits all mentality when it comes to education. Even if some kids don't get a lot out of home education, some really enjoy it, and it can be a great bonding experience for many parents and children. It feels irresponsible to dismiss it all together.
> we don't tell artistic kids that they shouldn't paint so well, because kids aren't supposed to be at that level yet, nor do we tell athletic kids this. But it's extremely common in subjects like math.
It's even more common as applied to holding a job, which is out-and-out illegal for children in most cases.
Summer reading programs are a band-aid on the problem that children shouldn’t have such a long summer break now that air conditioning is common. Spread the breaks out throughout the year if you want to maintain the same number of days off. All evidence shows the summer break is bad for children’s academic achievement (especially poor children), but it is viewed as a perk for the teachers so the teacher’s unions fight against questioning it.
Let’s say summer break is basically 3 months. I as a parent need to figure out childcare for that 3 month period at the beginning of summer. This is a much more time consuming endeavor than most would expect (or at least more than I expected). If you distribute those months throughout the year I need to repeat this process 3 different times, adding a bunch of overhead that could be spent on activities more beneficial to my family and kids.
Edit: Adding that I realize the summer slowdown absolutely exists and has a disproportionate effect on those that don’t need another wrench thrown in their life. But just wanted to add a perspective that isn’t “teacher union boogeyman”.
And there are schools that do year-round schedules, but the total time off is about the same. They will typically get a longer winter break, longer spring break, an additional fall break, and then a much shortened summer break, but those add up to about the same time off overall. I know many teachers who prefer that system, some because it means they get paychecks more consistently throughout the year, and also it gives you more spread out breaks and flexibility in taking trips instead of being locked in to summer/Christmas/one week in the spring.
The strongest push back to this schedule is in fact parents. The primary issue is once their kids are in different schools (high school / middle school / elementary) with different schedules this causes issues as kids are not longer on break at the same times. In addition summer camp programs are tied to the traditional schedule leaving kids in the year round schedule with fewer or no options.
In order to change it, you also need neighboring districts/communities/private schools/programming to all shift as well, otherwise it becomes too much of as hassle for parents & teachers.
Air conditioning is common, but at least in some regions, it would be a tremendous expense for the the school to condition their buildings for occupation during the summer. And many buildings were designed around the summer break, so they may not have capacity to condition the buildings for occupation during the summer; this is not without its problems as some buildings end up being unfit for occupation during the school year, especially as the climate gets less consistent. There's probably some opportunity for savings in places where increasing hours during the summer could result in decreasing hours in the winter, though.
I think there's some cultural value in having a shared experience of summer vacation. But I agree, breaking up the breaks throughout the year, where possible, would make a lot of sense. There's a benefit of less crowding when school districts have different weeks off; although it's harder for extended families to meet up when their school schedules are drastically different.
That assumes academic achievement should be the primary aim of childhood. What I learned in school was incredibly important—don’t get me wrong—but what I learned over the summer was arguably more important.
As a child of divorce, I cherished 6 straight weeks at my mom’s house (we only visited every other weekend during school). As a working class kid, I earned probably half my annual spending money over the summer.
My wife and I now have kids, and we’ve always loved to travel (and needed to just to visit family). Summer is the only time available for extended family trips (2+ weeks).
The argument wasn't for shortening it, but for distributing it through the year. I have never in my adult life taken 10 consecutive weeks off, and 5 two-week breaks would still be very generous.
Maybe summer break also has some value for the joy it brings to children? Their lives shouldn't just be preparation for adulthood, it's worth making childhood enjoyable too.
It is doing, but it's doing one thing: reading. Encouraging kids to read makes sense for building literacy and encouraging imagination, but there's a point where enough is enough, reading the 6th installment of Harry Potter is for entertainment, and they're better off riding a bike, building something, and making friends.
It's the same for adults. We blindly praise reading, but much of it belongs on the shelf at an airport bookstore, it's not particularly challenging or informing, and it might as well be video games or TV.
Doing what? Just whatever? As long as they aren't doing any reading?
They should also replace lunch period with a "life" period. I see a lot of kids sitting around eating, getting fat, but kids need experience in real life; eating will get them nowhere.
Reading is doing when it involves active engagement - kids who read deeply are processing, imagining, questioning, and building mental models they later apply to real-world problems.
Growing up Wishbone connected with me a lot more.
Looking back on the list of Reading Rainbow books: https://knowtea.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/rea...
I can't say I've read many of them.
With that said, I miss the trend of reading being so heavily emphasized in youth culture. Dolly Parton, free Pizza Hut, the accelerated reader program. I'm really grateful I grew up in the 90s.
Wishbone was a good show, but I think it occupies a different niche. Wishbone was about adapting the classics, and each episode was more of a production vs Reading Rainbow, which was formatted more to introduce kids to contemporary age-appropriate reading by focusing on picture books and excursions to thematically connected places.
The only downside is that Wishbone holds up better to a modern rewatch in comparison, as opposed to how RR is very much of its time. But that's ok, too; someone needs to inspire kids to be adventurous with their reading so that they can go out and find the next classics.
Wishbone skewed slightly older. Reading the classics vs reading fairly basic books was definitely for a bit older audience.
The Christian library one town over from where we live does a "reading summer" event every year for the school holidays: kids who borrow books, read them, and write a small book report (2-3 sentences) for them enter a lottery and can win a small prize at the end of the holidays. And I believe every participants gets a certificate also.
You'd think that this would not appeal to anyone, but they actually have a great turnout every year. Quite amazing actually.
Our local library had a summer reading program. You needed to talk about the book to a librarian, so we were waiting in line. The kid giving the book report was under 3 so it wasn't much of a book report, she asked the usual questions including "what was your favorite part of the book?"
The book the kid had read was Dinosailors which is about some dinosaurs who go on a sailing trip. The memorable part of the book is the page with no words that's just the dinosaurs throwing up because they all got seasick.
So, the non-verbal child happily reenacted their favorite part of the book.
Heave Ho! They cry. It won't stay down!
The next page illustration is epic.
https://youtu.be/M8p4FSYUqi4?feature=shared
There's something beautiful about the kid using performance as language. They've hit upon the greater truth that reading and speech are important because text and the spoken word are powerful mediums, but what truly matters is what they allow us to express to each other.
Though I have worked with children enough to sympathize with the not-beautiful part of this story too. (also that book sounds rad as hell.)
Pizza Hut's BOOK IT! program in the 80's where I would get a free personal pan pizza for each book read was a huge motivator.
I had totally forgotten about this program. And it's still around https://www.bookitprogram.com/ though I've not seen any mention of it where I live (rural Virginia). I may have to start promoting it if the area restaurant is participating.
the obesity-literacy pendulum
The Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza has about 600 calories in it. Maybe slightly indulgent, but that is a very reasonable reward and trade off for getting kids to read more.
People troll too much with their low effort comments. The thing was tiny, but it was a cool reward as a kid. I may be mistaekn but there was a limit too, it was either one per week or once a month.
I wasn't trolling. It was just an attempt to highlight something. this is a conversation about habit building. Do you think that pizza hut was doing this because of their love of reading? Is eating pizza regularly the good habit to build? Is using food as a reward a good habit? It's not good to associate eating foods with that elation that a child gets when they "win the prize" -- that's how people have issues later when their brain associates the two states.
> Do you think that pizza hut was doing this because of their love of reading?
Probably not; they really just wanted to make sure they didn't get out pizzaed.
> Is eating pizza regularly the good habit to build?
Pizza is a fairly balanced food, depending on toppings. Generally some protein, some vegetables. Macronutrient wise, it's a bit carb heavy, but not overwhelmingly so. Usually not a lot of added sugar, unless you're having a BBQ pizza, and not that much natural sugar either; some places might put more sugar into the pizza sauce though.
> Is using food as a reward a good habit?
No, probably not. But free food is a pretty effective motivator, so people use it.
> Pizza is a fairly balanced food, depending on toppings. Generally some protein, some vegetables. Macronutrient wise, it's a bit carb heavy, but not overwhelmingly so. Usually not a lot of added sugar, unless you're having a BBQ pizza, and not that much natural sugar either; some places might put more sugar into the pizza sauce though.
Just because there's comparatively little sugar in pizza, does not make it a fairly balanced food. It's high in fat and consequently high in calories. Case in point: that personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut is the size of a man's palm and has around 600 calories. 600! For a young child, that tiny thing alone is a third of the total recommended [1] daily calory intake. My son is 10, and he could probably eat 4 or 5 of these suckers easily.
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
Taking data from Pizza Hut [1], per Pepperoni - Personal Pan Pizza® Slice, there are 7 grams fat, 17 grams carbohydrates, 6 grams protein. Per slice is kind of silly, but we can analyze balance regardless. I picked Pepperoni based on perceived popularity, not to cherry pick.
At standard ratios [2], that's 63 kcal from fat, 68 from carbs, 24 from protein. Or
41% fat, 44% carb, 15% protein. Your resource suggests 25-35% calories from fat, so it's not that far off the goal. I'm not saying it's well balanced, just that it's fairly balanced.
> For a young child, that tiny thing alone is a third of the total recommended daily calory intake.
A third of the total recommended intake sounds appropriate for a meal?
> My son is 10, and he could probably eat 4 or 5 of these suckers easily.
Ok, but he's got to read 4 or 5 books for that, and maybe over several weeks? I'm not really sure how to address this. If you are going to eat 4 complete personal pizzas if available, then you probably should avoid them.
[1] https://www.nutritionix.com/pizza-hut/menu/premium
[2] https://www.nal.usda.gov/programs/fnic
I know you're writing this in good faith, and please understand that I'm doing the same.
> A third of the total recommended intake sounds appropriate for a meal?
Only superficially, I think. First, this pizza can hardly be considered "a meal" because it's too small to be filling. That's why I pointed out that even a 10-year old will probably not be satiated by just one such pizza.
But also, a third of your daily calorie budget allocated to just the food part of one meal assumes the classic model of three meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner) - but beware that many people take in additional calories via inbetween snacks (esp. kids).
Also, the pizza only accounts for the food part of that meal - so you better be drinking just water along with it. Except that most kids don't. [1] So, it's a bit of a fallacy to assume that a third of your recommended daily intake of calories is what can be alloted to the food part of a single meal. It might be okay, but like I hopefully was able to highlight, it's easy to undercount because of other factors such as snacks and drinks.
Also note that food labels are not super accurate [2], and of course it's in any junk food company's interest to make their meals look better than they actually might be.
> Ok, but he's got to read 4 or 5 books for that, and maybe over several weeks? I'm not really sure how to address this. If you are going to eat 4 complete personal pizzas if available, then you probably should avoid them.
Agreed. Let's keep in mind that these are not full sized pizzas, and my son is very active (and slim). But the problem is that highly palatable foods like pizza are just so damn hard to avoid in practice. It's too easy (and enjoyable!) to overeat on them.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db271.htm
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/calorie-labels-arent-accurat...
I would argue that those of us raised in the 80's turned out on average significantly better than today's crop of kids who are taught to fear everything and/or treat everything with drugs.
It's not that people troll too much with low effort comments.
It's that low effort comments are followed by troll-lighting the original commenter as the troll, downvoting their post, upvoting ones own. That is - often the biggest troll in the room is the one accusing others of trolling.
And it was a brilliant marketing gimmick too. The kid would need their family to bring them, and siblings & parents would probably pick up some drinks (fountain drinks are what, 90% margin?) or their own food that they might not have otherwise ordered out that night.
+1 this was a really neat carrot. In retrospect I am thankful for these carrots as they boost curiosity and self-learning, without much harm. People are going to eat out anyhow, what's the harm in marketing that also supports good behavior?
As a yuth in the East Bay my Alameda Co. library had a summer reading program with a treasure map. For each book you read, you got a stamp on the map. Then at the end there was a forgettable prize, though, after 45 years I’ve not forgotten the journey.
I miss our east bay library. Not saying other places aren’t good, but that’s where we were when our kids were little and the staff was just so amazing.
> You'd think that this would not appeal to anyone,
Why would this not appeal to anyone? Summer reading games are super popular and kids love getting small prizes
My local library still does Summer reading programs for both adults and kids. My teacher spouse does the adult one since she has a lot of free time in the Summer. She gets at least one gift basket each Summer that includes a $25 gift card to a local restaurant, as I'm pretty sure its just her and maybe 2 other adults doing it.
Idk read a book and do homework to get a chance to win a small thing during your summer break? That would’ve been a hard sell to me as a kid. I’m glad to hear that my skepticism about such a program is wrong though!
Primary school kids in Switzerland used to (and maybe they still do) run class-wide "competitions" on the points earned on a similar reading challenge - Antolin if I remember correctly and my kid was quite in for it.
We had something like this in our school called Accelerated Reader. Read books answer a quiz on it get points, best class/student got rewarded.
Was really easy to game though. Our school library had a selection of books for what I can only assume were for special needs kids, really really simple books very few words with even fewer pages. These books rewarded an appropriate amount of points however so you got less, but you could easily bang out 20 of those books in one class and get a lot more points than you'd be rewarded for reading a real book.
A few of us would just go over grab a bunch of those books and read through them in like 2 minutes and complete the quiz.
They ended up not letting those books get used for AR
We had Accelerated Reader in my public school in Texas in the early 2000s.
It was a pretty cool system.
The lottery system described upstream is terrible.
But with Accelerated Reader you would accumulate points that you could spend on things like the Scholastic Book Fair (buy books), slices of pizza for lunch, and various toy gadgets. Sometimes a teacher would sell some gimmick like a get out of homework ticket.
Of course, you'd have to read a good number of books to receive any of these prizes. But you were always working towards something unlike a lottery system which isn't motivating at all.
My friend group got busted for gaming AR and we were banned from it. The interface allowed us to sort the books by points, so we took the top 10 books, split them up among us, summarized them, took the tests, and gave each other the answers. The jig was up when they printed a leaderboard and we were all way ahead with an absurd number of points. They took them all away and we weren’t allowed to participate anymore.
I gamed AR in the early '90s when it was much simpler. I was in elementary school, and they counted a book as a certain number of pages read (as certified by a parent), the multiple of which increased as you grade number increased. So in third grade every 30 pages counted as a book. So I read my family's complete collection of Dr. Seuss books, as well as my own, like the Boxcar Children. By the end of the program I'd read "93" books.
Cool. Although my gut reaction would be that this mostly incentives the kids who already enjoy reading to read more, while the ones who are not great at reading know that they don't have a chance, so perhaps are discouraged from reading even more?!
As yes, my school in the US did that (sporadically) and awarded medals based on tiers. I remember thinking the silver one looked the nicer, and so was careful not to read too much over the summer.
Contests run by smarter people have a prize pool, with prize selection priority assigned by performance rank.
https://usamts.org/about/prizes/
Growing up in Scotland my friends and I all partook in a similar program
Sure am glad that we didn't just cut $9 billion in funding towards PBS and other public broadcasting institutions that aired Reading Rainbow.
Just for full accuracy: $9b is the total in the claw back bill. About $1.1b of that is CPB (PBS+NPR).
So what you're saying is, Trump or Elon could, in theory, write a check and fund it for the next fiscal year?
If you want to go back to the medieval patronage model, that's certainly a possibility. There were good reasons for moving away from that model, though.
Surely you don’t think it could be that bad if we were to sell all of our news media to a few rich companies in what some have called an oligopoly
Based on the text of the legislation passed by the Senate, it looks like the ~$1 billion was for 2026 & 2027 fiscal years.
> (20) (A) Amounts made available for “Corporation for Public Broadcasting” for fiscal year 2026 by Public Law 118–47 are rescinded.
> (B) Amounts made available for “Corporation for Public Broadcasting” for fiscal year 2027 by Public Law 119–4 are rescinded.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4/te...
Someone could also fund it forever, with a donation large enough such that the endowment's dividends exceed yearly costs.
But no one has.
$9B?! Path to everything being private. Don't they want to also break up NOAA and National Weather to make them basically just data services? Private companies would then be the ones to publish it. Want to know the weather? Subscribe.
These services are irreplaceable. once they are gone, they are gone.
as for NOAA, China could decide to undermine the profiteering of weather in the US (as it did with AI using DeepSeek) by simply expanding the Fengyun satellite constellation to cover the globe (as it did with beidou) thereby providing weather forecasts for North America as well via the web, social media, and mobile app free of charge as a form of Kissinger style "soft power."
satellites are one thing, but they can hardly replace American radiosondes (well, without getting them shot out of the sky anyway)
Didn't you hear? Sesame Street is old hat. The new way to have kids learn stuff is with Little Beasts, a Mr. Beast YouTube series brought to you by Prime Energy and Feastibles.
Like I'm joking but that's the idea.
At least we have the Australian's to give us Bluey and the UK for Peppa pig.
For now, We (the UK) seem as usual to be on your path just a decade or so behind.
Reform is our version of MAGA and just as odious.
I'd say the UK does things at the same time, just in a different order. See Brexit in 2016, same year as Trump being elected.
They aren't breaking up NOAA just for the sake of privatization, reliable weather reporting also makes it harder to ignore Climate Change. From Project 2025 "[NOAA offices] form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity."
> main drivers of the climate change alarm industry
This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates? What's their main source of income, who benefits from it, and how? And what is the supposed goal of it?
Raising the alarm about a conceieved threat could be a way to raise money for more research, which might indirectly benefit those scientists. But we haven't really seen a corresponding massive increase in scientists employed, and even if we did, they would have to find some way to leak money through publicly funded research to their own private enterprises because so far no one has suggested that we pay scientific researchers too much. The way to combat that would be to demand more transparency from universities, but they're already pretty good about that.
It also doesn't match very well what those scientists are actually saying. Which is mostly that the basic science is indisputable since the past century and more research is not required but action. Had the climate scientists been siphoning public money through alarmists schemes, wouldn't they rather say that things are very dire but "don't touch! We need much more expensive research before we can give any concrete advice"?
I don't think the allegation is that the scientists themselves are who benefits.
Rather, I think the allegation is that it's those involved in renewable energy development schemes that result from the raised alarm, from product vendors to site developers to construction contractors to energy trading firms to... See also: politicians pushing Green New Deal type policies. The scientists are enablers, not the primary beneficiaries, at least as I understand the allegations.
That's a real issue with several real life examples, but not really related to the issue of climate change or climate alarmism, is it?
There's been plenty of extended circles around political interests that has lined their pockets in matters of alcohol and drug prevention, abuse prevention and health care, but very few people seem to be taking the local step to actually, alcohol are good for you and anyone that says otherwise should be labelled alcohol alarmists. It's pretty unique to climate research.
I seem to remember that there were was a enormous backlash against CFC bans, and lots of talk about how it would lead to the spread of preventable illness and economic disaster, but it never reached nearly the same levels of anti scientific discourse as we see today.
>This is clearly dog whistle langauge and not intended to be taken literally, but it is starting to be a common trope and it makes me very curious as to how this industry operates?
It's clearly just dismissive language that doesn't have to make sense. The only purpose is to make climate change seem like a fake concept thought of by groups with nefarious intentions. It's like asking the author of a short story what the main character's favorite color is. That detail simply wasn't considered because it's not needed in the short story.
> climate change alarm industry
I would actually like to buy a climate change alarm clock
10 minutes till midnight. Put it right next to your nuclear clock
We just keep hitting snooze. That's how we got into this mess.
(It's a future generation's problem, right?...)
Gonna make one of those novelty clocks themed around the financial boom-bust cycle, where, to silence it, you have to get out of bed and literally kick a can.
> We just keep hitting snooze.
Hah I wish - hitting snooze would at least push it back.
We're just putting our heads under the pillow to try and ignore the blaring alarm.
> is harmful to future U.S. prosperity
So is sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the coming disaster. Next quarter thinking should not be the government policy.
Don’t look up!
That's just the PBS stuff everyone knows about.
Back in the 90's and 00's, PBS had a show called "Irasshai" [1] aimed at high school students. It was a complete two year Japanese language education class filmed in conjunction with Georgia Tech.
They produced 140 30-minute lessons and produced two 500 page text books and teacher lesson plans. Study materials, homework, tests - everything.
It typically aired at 4 AM, so they asked you to set your VCR to record. If you couldn't do that, they could mail you the entire VHS boxed set of episodes.
But that's not the cool and powerful part. They actually let you register for classes and conference call in with an actual teacher. Twice to three times a week with class sizes of 4-6 students. Everyone took turns reading, answering questions, practicing dialogue. All year long.
There were tests and grades, and regular 1-1 proctored verbal exams. It was incredible.
The entire program was offered for free.
It was one of the coolest ways to learn Japanese and it was incredibly effective. This was such an amazing program for high schools that typically only offered Spanish lessons.
And now that's gone.
[1] https://www.gpb.org/irasshai
Wow. I would've absolutely done that had I known about it. (I was in high school in the very late 2000s/early 2010s, so perhaps I was already too late, but yeah, wow.)
Thanks for that link though, a commenter says the vids are still there. (I'm too busy learning Chinese at this point though, I'm afraid!)
Thank you for the link. The videos are there on the web site, not gone.
The videos may be there but the program is gone.
What is the case for funding this via a public television station instead of via schools? We already have infrastructure and a wider reach for education in schools? Wouldn't the money have been better served creating a Japanese language program in Georgia high schools?
This benefited interested people nationwide, not only in Georgia but certainly including Georgia, and without disrupting local school’s already tight budgets in ways that their local decision makers would find hard to afford.
The obvious thing to cut is the goddamn military. I’m not even talking about cutting things off to make the military weaker in a world that largely doesn’t need a powerful military. I’m talking about actual insane over spending.
But even Elon couldn’t do that. I don’t know if any president can. Something is deeply wrong here.
Watching the events over the past several years and thinking we need to reduce military spending is a wild take.
Even the EU and Japan have massive increased amount of additional spend into military.
The free world is under WW2 levels of threat. Hundreds of millions of people are going to perish unless deterence works.
Wanting to reduce spending does not automatically mean reduced force capability, nor reduced deterrence.
The challenge is that the next war wont look like the last one or the one before that. So you might decide that instead of sinking a gazillion dollars on a 25-year project to build some fighter jets or littoral ships, you spend half a gazillion dollars on cyber and drones.
Problem is that states and their leaders (politicians, business, resident voices) find it emotionally and politically hard to pivot from building X in state A to building Y in state B.
Right now, everyone is studying the lessons of the Ukraine war. That certainly should be looked at and learned from (build drones at mass scale, say) but it would also be possible to draw entirely incorrect conclusions for the next war. As a land war in Europe, Ukraine shows us the importance of essentially 1900s-style tools: shells and ordnance by the million. Tanks. Etc. If (god forbid) someone got into a hot war with China, the needs would be entirely different.
It’s always tempting to look at the Russian assault on Ukraine and “learn lessons” but you also have to remember that NATO countries aren’t Ukraine and Russia isn’t China.
The use of drones by both sides is in part because neither side could get air superiority, Ukraine because it barely had an air force and Russia because..well decades of corruption.
If the US had invaded Ukraine, Ukraine would have lost in under a month, the insurgency would be horrific and make Iraq look mild but militarily Russia was a complete basket case.
The lesson we should take is that ammunition stockpiles evaporate faster than you expect always in a full scale war, this has been true all the way back to the invention of the bow though.
I don't disagree but clearly not what the op was trying to say.
To your points.
Isreal just leveled iran without a single plane shot down, tech still dominates. The F35 is a terrifying weapon and Irans drone and missle attacks were ineffective. Ukraine shows us what two poor and land locked countries fight like.
Part of that is because they can't trust the US, which outspends China 3x over and outspends Russia 7x over, and outspends dozens of other countries combined. The US is the biggest military threat the world has ever known, and our government is acting crazy right now. Nobody should trust the US, a single country with 37% of the world's entire military budget with only 4% of the people, that is ridiculous and dangerous.
The only reason for the US to continue its military spending is to enforce its will upon the world by force or going on conquests for land, neither of which is a good or righteous cause that nobody should be supporting.
It's not an unfair argument to say the US is a global superpower with questionable intent.
But it's not hard to prefer Pax Americana to WW3.
Super power gonna super power. Wether it is Romans/Arabs/British/US or maybe future China.
None of them play nice and there's generally always one. I'd prefer to live in the peak power of these countries over the total chaos in between their collapse. The entire world has gotten insanely rich and healthy under US dominance I don't think wanting that to continue is an immoral desire.
History will remember the US as the empire to bring about the modern era much like the british brought about industrialization and global trade.
That's a little harsh.
Many countries that in actuality do not have nukes would have obtained nukes if the US hadn't made security guarantees to them. Those guarantees would not have been as persuasive (in getting countries to forgo getting nukes) if the US military wasn't as strong as it actually was. And the world is a safer place because only 9 countries have nukes.
Also, before now there's never has been an 80-year-long period without a major war between European powers. If the US military had been less strong, then the major powers of Europe would have felt the need to spend more on their militaries (at first to deter the Soviets / Russia, but then also to deter each other) which would have increased the probability of a war between European powers.
If I was in a country without nukes im not sure I would consider myself safer and would likely be an advocate for my government to gain nukes if there was any threat at all of someone attacking or invading in order to prevent it, especially if the US could be a potential enemy as only nukes would be an actual deterrent from meddling or invading.
The free world is under WW2 levels of threat? Listen to yourself. You’re brainwashed. Is China slaughtering Jews like the holocaust? Is China trying to wage war against the world and build an empire? Nobody actually wants war. In fact if war happens it will be the US getting into the whole Taiwan and China conflict that is none of its fucking business in the first place.
The world is building military defense against a threat that will never materialize. That’s one half the story. The other half of the story is a big economic dick measuring contest where the country with the most military might (that they will never use) is the better country.
China is rapidly building an army at a pace larger than germany or the US in WW2.
They actively threaten their neighbor and openly say force is being considered while also designing specialized equipment to enable this.
China actively is trying to expand territory and have plans to expand to the different island chains by certain years.
US military analyst have been warning for nearly a decade that china is planning for war between 2025-2030. All recent US actions under Biden and Trump both correlate with senior US officials taking this seriously.
Even JAPAN a openly pacifist country is increasing military spending. Europe just made a plan for like 800B$ of military spend.
Even a conservative viewer should see this as pretty clear sign that the world is preparing for war no?
I'm all for cutting the military spending to less than half... that said, it's still much smaller than entitlement spending at this point... there needs to be a lot of effort to reduce fraud and increase competition in medical/pharma space. Why there aren't licensing and dual sourcing requirements for medications is beyond me. Let alone allowing commercials that nowhere else in the world allows.
Pharma companies already aren't very profitable and it's getting worse and worse every year (called "Eroom's Law" for the reverse of Moore's).
The US's uniquely fucked healthcare situation is thanks to 1) administrative overhead of tons of competitive and extremely complex distinct health plans, and 2) the labor cost of doctors, much of which gets captured by the extremely consolidated health systems that employ them.
The US needs to dump money into training a lot more doctors. Not by subsidizing student loans, but by directly creating public medical schools that train doctors on the cheap and let them escape with no student debt.
I'd settle for not capping residency slots and in return allowing doctors to own hospitals.
Residency slots are not capped. Common misconception.
Private parties are welcome to create and fund residency slots if they want. They typically don’t because it’s a totally nonsense investment — perfect example of a problem that private investment markets would fail to solve.
The “cap” refers to the fact that CMS doesn’t fund an infinite number of residency slots.
So you and I are saying similar things, which is that the government needs to fund more MD training.
> But even Elon couldn’t do that.
Why should he? Who pays for Starlink? Who pays for rocket launches with satellite cargo? Who pays for advanced vehicle research?
Musk is benefiting of that by a lot. Where he cuts is oversight over his business and areas where one can provide commercial products.
>Even Elon
I think that is the wrong framing. I'd be more surprised if someone with no real government experience has much success with that venture.
I'd rather have someone with years and years of experience with DoD budgets and the expertise to prioritize the right cuts.
Of course a guy with zero knowledge of how things work, but a lot of confidence and ideaologically fueeled ressentment could not cut spending.
Then again, goal was to destroy and harm and that was achieved.
I will miss PBS SpaceTime on YouTube :(
Butterfly in the Sky, documentary on Netflix:
https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81750412?s=i&trkid=25859316...
This article lavishes well-deserved praise on the intentions behind Reading Rainbow. I know I loved the show as a kid.
But it seems like childhood reading scores were pretty much flat between 1983 and 2006, when the show was on the air: they only varied by 10-15 points on a 500 point scale[1], and there was no clear upward trend, it just sort of fluctuated. Reading for pleasure has never been lower among kids, either[2]. It doesn't seem to me that the mission of the show was achieved, if the mission was to make children read more books, and understand them more.
Ultimately I think it ended up just being a pleasurable way to have kids get distracted by a friendly, positive TV show. My guess is that if you want to improve reading scores and habits, parents have to do more than just turn the dial to PBS.
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/12/among-man...
It would be more relevant to look at reading scores for children who specifically tuned into Reading Rainbow. I suspect the number of viewers was a small fraction of all children in the US, in which case the show's ability to affect the nationwide reading scores would be low. In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
We'd also have to figure out whether children who already loved reading watched Reading Rainbow, or if children who hated reading started liking it after watching. Since nobody has that data, I'll go with the aggregate.
> In other words, I don't believe the data you cited supports a conclusion that the show was ineffective at educating individual viewers.
I don't think it conclusively proves anything, but I do think it supports a skeptical position. The article doesn't cite anything supporting the notion that Reading Rainbow improved childhood literacy, so I'm wondering if you take the position that it did—and if so, on what basis?
RR was swimming against a current; 83-06 (and even going back to the early 70s) would have been the first generation+ raised by the first generations raised by TV, or with a TV in the house. It was also the first generation with access to the internet during childhood and young adulthood. People waiting for the movie to come out instead of reading the novel, etc. Everything about the technological zeitgeist was selling Americans on the idea that books didn't matter. The question isn't whether RR raised reading scores, but whether it kept them above water. Your graphs can't tell us anything about which is the case, but considering the context shows us which question is actually interesting and which isn't.
You may be right, but we have no idea what the scores would have been had Reading Rainbow not been on (i.e., maybe it held off a decline), so this isn't really meaningful one way or the other.
They didn't start tracking in 1983, the numbers I linked start in 1971. The trend line is pretty much the same from 1971 to 1983 as it is from 1983 to 2006. In any case, a skeptical person would not look at that graph and say that there was a successful effort to improve childhood literacy represented on it.
It's true that we don't know the counterfactual: it's possible literacy would have plummeted precipitously starting in 1984 if Reading Rainbow hadn't been a bulwark. But I don't find that the most likely explanation, personally.
Any scheme that counts on parents to do something unfortunately leaves many kids in the dust at no fault of their own.
LeVar Burton hosted a podcast marketed for adults where he read short stories. Though it ended last year, there are almost 200 episodes in the archive.
He’s still been at work encouraging lifelong reading all these years later.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/levar-burton-reads/id1...
That was a well done show for kids. LeVar Burton can read a book better than me, and I am not ashamed to admit it. He made learning accessible, fun, and cool.
He also has that rare Fred Rogers-esque gift of talking in a way children understand without talking down to them.
Not unheard of in today’s tap-obsessed world of YouTube Kids & streaming apps, but much harder to find.
As a child in the late 80s/early 90s, I remember watching Star Trek TNG as new episodes were coming out, and also watching Reading Rainbow (I loved both shows).
The episode where Reading Rainbow visited the Star Trek TNG set was one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIRz_qpgD-0
I've got some sort of weak facial blindness, so I did not connect that Burton and La Forge were the same person.
As a child learning that two of your favorite people were in fact the same person was pretty mind blowing for me.
Adults, too. I might not know what an inverse-tachyon pulse is, but thanks to his convincing demeanor I understand that it could cause a localized spatial distortion.
He’s a compelling speaker and onscreen talent, I agree. He’s using his superpowers for good, whatever they are. Being able to connect through a screen wasn’t normalized back then. Educational content needed that personal touch. I think it makes all the difference.
Whatever works, I guess. It made a difference, although it was corny somewhere between `Punky Brewster` and `Captain Planet`. Vintage `Sesame Street` is legit cool.
> LeVar Burton can read a book better than me, and I am not ashamed to admit it.
This is a weird comment. He’s a professional actor. I hope he does
He makes the hard thing look easy. This wasn’t a backhanded compliment but a genuine one. He isn’t acting per se, but he does voice act the stories. It was audiobooks and ASMR sorta before those things were cool. He does a fantastic job with the words on the page and also goes on-site to film IRL things from the books. It’s a simple premise and it works. It doesn’t have to be surprising to be enjoyable and engaging.
Why are you looking for a hyper stimulus? Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
If child requires hyper stimulus to be engaged in this area, suspect other hyper stimulus present.
> Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
The stories we grew up to were indeed those which won "a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability". Only interesting stories got retold. Stories travelled further when made into songs. They became artworks when tranformed into plays. They became myths and legends in the luggage of those travelling the planet. And the art of telling stories also became a way of making a living much before our contemporary society produced the first pop star.
> Why are you looking for a hyper stimulus? Man didn’t evolve in an environment where stories were told by people who’d won a massive intertribe tournament of story telling ability. Stories were told by family.
> If child requires hyper stimulus to be engaged in this area, suspect other hyper stimulus present.
Reading Rainbow is the opposite of a hyperstimulus compared to most tv programs, let alone “educational” tv programming.
I wasn’t seeking a hyperstimulus. You don’t even know me. I could read and write before kindergarten, which was my first schooling outside the home.
> compared to most tv programs
Modern media is so replete with hyper stimuli that it is often hard to see where the line is between what is evolutionarily congruent and what is greater.
I don’t see how knowing you is relevant. This is my position on what most people do. Either you have a different viewpoint on this than the mainstream and yet arrived at the very same conclusions, or I essentially am familiar with your viewpoint in this area. What have I gotten wrong?
I would expect being a professional storyteller to translate a lot better to reading aloud than being a professional actor, really.
I was bored to tears and I read more than the average kid. I liked the aesthetic though and I wanted to like it because it seemed wholesome. I’ve always suspected RR is one of those shows that everyone knows they should like so they all talk it up as if they did like it. Kinda like Rust.
Or maybe many did genuinely enjoy RR but you just weren’t the target audience? If it was created to combat the summer reading slump, it likely wasn’t targeting already avid readers.
FWIW, though, my experience was similar to yours: I read a ton and loved the feel of the show, but the actual content was a little slow.
I agree that it’s the feel of the show. I grew up with 3 free to air channels, and one of them was a PBS station. The content was better than the competition or the VHS tape collection, or replaying one of the video games.
I genuinely liked it even though I could read fine. It was an excuse to use the tv when I might not have a good reason to use it instead of someone else otherwise and I enjoyed the content well enough even if I was a couple years older than the intended audience. The public broadcasting shows of that era were weirdly good imo, with Mr Rogers and Shirley Lewis doing puppets, but wholesome too.
Ghost Writer was ahead of its time and deserves a post of its own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter_(1992_TV_series)
> The series revolves around a multiethnic group of friends from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood crimes and mysteries as a team of youth detectives with the help of a ghost named Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter can communicate with children only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and using them to form words and sentences.
> Ghostwriter producer and writer Kermit Frazier revealed in a 2010 interview that Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the American Civil War. He taught other slaves how to read and write and was killed by slave catchers and their dogs. His spirit was kept in the book that Jamal discovers and opens in the pilot episode, freeing the ghost.
Wishbone has costumes and a dog for your dramatic re-enactments of books with a dog actor in the lead role. This is crazy town, and I’m here for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(TV_series)
The entire PBS slate of shows was elite. Very little did I know at the time how initiative-driven it was (a great thing). To me where in the world was Carmen Sandiego was a fun trivia game. To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map.
"To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map."
This is a very glib take. The origin of the series was a 1985 educational computer game from Broderbund. The target age group wasn't expected to know all this information, which is why the game shipped with an almanac.
Not sure if it was on purpose but your take is the glib one.
“The show was created partially in response to the results of a National Geographic survey indicating little knowledge of geography among some of the American populace, with one in four being unable to locate the Soviet Union or the Pacific Ocean.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_in_the_World_Is_Carmen...
Now of course the tv show is an offspring from the video game but it’s well documented that the specific format was to combat geography. So it’s a fine statement to state that is the purpose of the show creators as that was the mission from PBS at the time.
> To me where in the world was Carmen Sandiego was a fun trivia game. To the creators, they were trying to address the issue of americans not knowing where the country was on a map.
Was there a show? To me Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was a reoccurring segment on a show called Square One. I liked it, but it didn't feel like it was the source of Carmen Sandiego mythology; it felt more like a minor epiphenomenon.
There was also a computer game, which I didn't play much of because it was a lot of work. It felt a lot more fully developed than the TV segments, though.
Yes, there was half-hour game show for kids that aired on PBS in the early 90s. For anyone who's ever seen it, chances are the theme song is permanently burned into their brain: Do it, Rockapella! [1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_in_the_World_Is_Carmen_S...
1: https://youtu.be/9ubKvQe2hQU?si=jHjOKvKuWukQkBUJ&t=1510
The game came first, and the TV shows were spun off from it, which is probably why the game feels more fully developed. It grew into a whole media franchise -- there were Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? game shows on PBS, as well as a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? Saturday morning cartoon, and more recently, an animated series on Netflix. I don't remember there being Carmen Sandiego segments on Square One but I also don't remember Square One all that well in the first place.
I always immediately turned it off when I was a kid. I appreciate its purpose now, but loathed it when I was in the target audience.
It's a TV show for kids who do NOT read.
I honestly just loved the theme song and the good vibes, but yeah, I didn't really watch it watch it.
Norway has gamified summer reading https://sommerles.no/svar It's quite popular in the first half of elementary school. You get points for registering read books (even if your parent read it for your, or audio books) and every week all the libraries put up a poster with this week's "code word" which you get points for typing into your profile, and whenever you level up ten levels you get a little prize you can pick up from the library (like a tiny toy, they had shark teeth one year)
> get points for registering read books
> little prize you can pick up from the library
I am not convinced that this is really motivating to kids. Don't they have tons' of toys at home an in the library to play with already. Why would they care about tiny shark teeth.
Also i find the whole concept of 'read to get prize' cynical, cheap and manipulative. Don't want to manipulate my own child with these cheap tricks.
Don’t underestimate the power of junk prizes. It’s how McDonald’s has gotten away with selling overpriced kids meals for decades.
My kids love the novelty of garbage prize toys and while I think they are stupid, my kids get weirdly motivated by the promise of a trip to the dollar store.
I had similar qualms, but after seeing the actual effects I've changed my mind, at least as regards Sommerles (I'm less positive to other forms of gamification, especially if they're considered an alternative to non-gamified learning instead of a minor supplement in a well-rounded system). We already have prizes and competitions and these external structures for sports and such. People send little kids into soccer tournaments, we just make sure the rules aren't too strictly enforced and the major part of the reward is for just playing.
I have a kid who loves listening to stories but isn't at all motivated to read alone – and probably would not have read a single book alone this summer if it wasn't for Sommerles. Maybe it's not motivating for all kids, but I'm sure happy it's helping my kid get some much-needed reading practice. I also think you underestimate children. My other kid, already a self-motivated reader, re-read short books really fast to get all possible prizes within the first week (librarian eyebrows were raised). Who was doing the manipulation here? :-)
> much-needed reading practice
why is it 'much needed' ? let them chill man..:)
manipulation or motivation? I suppose it's blurry.
But, I think the point is that once you get the kids into the habit (or help them build the skill) they'll maintain it later on. Even encouraging reading together has societal value.
So, maybe tiny shark teeth are good motivation - i have no idea. I'm not great at gauging what motivates kids. I still don't understand minecraft.
Do you have children? You tell them something is animal-related and they tend to get really excited. Even more so for dinosaurs. My five year old has no concept of money, but he does have a concept of “new thing I can play with”.
When I was a kid we had Book It. I got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut for every 10(?) books I read. I read a lot of books! I also learned a lot along the way, and continued the habit of reading for fun through college.
when i was a kid, reading was gamified by pizza hut through the 'book it' program.
Reminds of another 1980s reading incentive thing, tho during the schoolyear not summer: Pizza Hut's Book It!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It!
Read books, get free pizza you want, not the pizza they serve at school. Whoever invented this is a genius. I still regret losing the holographic Book It! pin I had, but I can probably find another one if I look.
It was sort of Ronald Reagan that invented it.
It seems that Reagan was involved from very early, but Book It! was created by Pizza Hut folks:
> Book It! was conceived in 1984 during a dinner with Art Gunther, President of Pizza Hut, and Bud Gates, SVP of Marketing at Pizza Hut, as a way to help Gunther's son read more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Hut#Book_It%21
This is not at all to discount how Reagan championed Book It! specifically. He also worked on other literacy projects, and declared 1987 the Year of the Reader.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-15-vw-2399-s... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250512024034/https://www.latim...
> Like many simple plans, this one was hard to realize. Beginning last January, Gunther met several times with Secretary of Education William Bennett, representatives of President Reagan’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiative, and teachers’ and school administrators’ groups. With input from the educators, Gunther and his associate Sharon Knight designed a program.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/proclamation-5... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250515204005/https://www.reaga...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/109483711@N02/13567960943/in/p... | https://web.archive.org/web/20150324235000/https://www.flick...
Considering how involved he was in the project and how early, I'm won't quibble on this point, since you said sort of invented. I don't see how it would have had the success it did without his involvement and efforts, but he didn't invent it strictly speaking.
We did Book It! for a couple of years, but Accelerated Reader for most of the others. One of my favorite childhood memories as a kid was having to go to the local junior high, because the elementary school didn't have the test for the books I was reading.
It also made me want to read Anna Karenina, because that was listed as the book with the highest points awarded. It only took me 30 years to get around to finishing it.
My favorite Doors song! [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/--RYPHqbD50?si=YvldZg_xt--H3LSn
I wonder how many public libraries are there in US.
In Poland every gmina (which is like a collection of a few villages - around 10k people and 10x10 km) have a public library. It's how I learned to love reading books - there was no internet yet, TV had like 3 channels, and I was on vacations bored to hell. So I went to the library and started borrowing random books. I didn't had to drive anywhere or ask my parents - it was just a short walk.
I especially love the small countryside libraries where you don't need to ask the librarian for a book you want - you walk among the shelves and look for the books yourself. Back in 80s/90s most books in such libraries were hand-covered with gray packing-paper covers and had the author and title written by the librarian on that. So you didn't even had images on the cover to let you know what the book was about. It was a complete surprise every time. Through 3 summer vacations I went through half the library, even trying some Harlequins or "collected works of Lenin" :) (not a very good read BTW). Mostly I looked for fantasy and sci-fi, but that was like 5 shelves out of 50, so I tried everything eventually. And I learnt to love reading ever since.
The US public library system is very big. There are over 17,000 libraries and that doesn't include the almost 100,000 libraries that are in schools.
My city (Seattle, a pretty large US city) has 27 public libraries. I only live a few blocks from the closest one but could fairly easily walk to at least 2 more.
> 17,000 libraries
It doesn't seem like "A lot" for a country the size of US TBH.
Poland has 7541 public libraries. Which is 1 per 41 km^2, but of course big cities have many libraries, so the actual distance is larger in the countryside. But it's a number.
17000 libraries in US is like one per 580 km^2.
And yes every school has one too, there's 35 000 schools. But many of these are very small libraries that mostly carry mandatory lectures for school + some classic books. In my village the school library sucked.
I lived in a village of 500 people and had a library within 5 minute walk.
Going by land area isn't a great metric, since the US has a great deal of unpopulated or sparsely populated space. Per capita might be better, but not by much. But if you go "per city," the US has around 19,000 incorporated areas. So 17k libraries to 19k incorporated areas (cities, towns, villages, designated census areas, etc.), might be better metric.
You can have small towns with libraries in the US, too. Flatonia, TX has a population of 1,300 and has a public library.
There are probably even smaller towns, but I know Flatonia has one because I've been there.
There's a town near me that has a population of 1100 and a nice small library. And there's state-wide interlibrary loan, so small-town libraries can get you anything the bigger ones have.
I guess one needs to consider the US is geographically much larger and most land doesn't actually contain people. Considering the density is wiser, but even still. Libraries per occupied area still isn't a good metric. There is no good metric.
What's more important is the qualitative offerings and impact:
1. Spectrum of a. most common services and collections offered everywhere to b. the most comprehensive of those offered by a specific library.
2. What people can do at them: read, research subjects, borrow things, accomplish tasks, host meetings, etc.
This is very hard to measure and not something a business person running the government "like a business" would understand.
IMO the most important metric is "what percentage of kids can walk to a library without asking anybody".
But nowadays people have internet, so I guess it's not THAT important anymore. The ideal library is just a website that lets you download pirated ebooks for free.
You've just reinvented Z-library. ;)
The utility of the brick-and-mortar is that some/(many by state) libraries include services and physical items that can be checked out besides media. Plus, besides free Wi-Fi and meeting rooms, it's a non-consumption location to exist in a physical public space. There aren't many more free spaces in America. And, there are millions of people who can't afford internet, a tablet, a computer, or have a place for books. Millions of books and historical local newspapers don't exist in electronic form!
But no, really, (most of) America is truly unwalkable for almost any activity.
To build a library close enough to most American kids that they could walk to it would likely be infeasible, because so many people live places that are simply not walkable at all.
Another commenter said 73% of americans live 1 mile of a library. Thats walkable. You don’t need brewpubcafes and tree lined streets to walk.
Can I walk a mile? Yes. Can I walk a mile from my house? Not safely.
There's a road I would have to walk down to get to anything that isn't on my street. One lane each way, no shoulders, no sidewalks, and very poor visibility of oncoming traffic due to an inconveniently placed hill.
The nearest public library to my childhood home was 2.2 miles; I would occasionally bike to it before I had a car, but it involved crossing one major street.
Have you seen pics of Houston? It can be infeasible to walk a mile if it’s split by a multi lane highway etc.
Most American cities are bicyclist- and pedestrian-hostile. There are some that aren't like Davis CA in the 90's.
You do need pavements tho, especially if the road has many lanes and people going 90 km/h.
In the United States (in 2020[1]), 100% of the population lived within 5 miles (8 km) of a local public library, with 99.1% of people living within 1 mile (1.6 km). That seems good enough to me.
[1] https://www.gc.cuny.edu/center-urban-research/research-proje...
73% live within a mile from your source not 99.1%.
Could your whole village walk to a library in 5 minutes?
Regardless of population density, villages/towns/settlements/cities tend to span a mile or more, not one acre with 1-1000 people surrounded by non-residential space.
How many books were in that library that served 500 people?
There's 3 smaller daughter-libraries in nearby villages. I'd say 20 minutes walk to the nearest library for everybody in the whole gmina is realistic. Less if you include school libraries (but they suck).
I had no idea how many books, checked right now and apparently it's 32 000. It's not really serving 500 people, it's got 1100 regular readers. Which means people are going there from other villages.
It also has all the multimedia stuff, audiobooks, internet access, printers, etc.
> I wonder how many public libraries are there in US.
A _lot_ of them (nearly 125000 about 250 people per library on average). And you can do inter-library loans, and you can check out DVDs and BluRays.
Is gmena a typo or does Polish seriously have “gm” as a digraph? I have seen a reasonable amount of written Polish but I’ve never noticed “gm” before. That strikes me as really reaching, get a different alphabet, already.
"Gmina" is correct. It's the lowest administrative unit in Poland.
There's a few other words with "gm", like "gmerać" (to fiddle with sth), "gmin" (plebs, common people - same root word as gmina I'd imagine), "gmach" (a huge building, usually of some public institution).
It's not a digraph tho, it's just pronounced as "g" and then "m"?
I'm like 99% sure it's a German loanword. Most of city/administration/building language in Polish comes from German - dach (roof), szyba (glass pane), rynek (main market square), ratusz (city hall), burmistrz (city mayor), rynsztok (gutter), etc.
All through middle ages Poland imported lots of germanic settlers and had them build whole new towns from scratch in Poland in exchange for tax breaks. There's a town called "Niemcy" (Germans/Mutes) like 10 km from where I live :), and there's a village called "Dys" nearby.
What's the problem with using latin script for gm by the way?
As someone who speaks German but not Polish, “Gemeinde” was the first thing that came to mind seeing that “gmina” is a collection of rural villages, because that’s what the smallest incorporated settlements here are called (at least in Bavaria). Gemeinde -> Markt -> Stadt
Even Germany has Gmünd: Schwäbisch Gmünd, Georgensgmünd…
It's not a digraph, it's pronounced /gm/
English has fairly common words with "gm", just not at the beginning of words. Figma and enigma immediately spring to mind. I'd even argue that people say "Big Mac" roughly the same speed as the above words. Plus, there's even that meme word from a few years ago (like a crude, less punny version of the "updog" joke, if that helps narrow down what I mean)
Why are _all_ your comments in this post negative?
> get a different alphabet, already
English has entered the chat
I’m sure I’m not the only one who fondly remembers their local public library’s “summer reading program” - read books, win prizes!
This brought back some memories. It’s kind of amazing how shows like this made reading feel fun instead of something you had to do. Just stories, imagination and a bit of magic, sometimes that’s all it takes to get a kid hooked on books.
My mom read books during the day when my dad was at work. She'd tell my dad how hard she worked all day :-)
I'd look over her shoulder and wonder how she made any sense out of the page full of text, as there were no pictures. I was fascinated by that, and was well motivated to learn to read.
I was not allowed to watch TV beyond Daktari and Saturday morning cartoons. I hated that restriction, but in hindsight my parents made the right call. My dad would watch the news, but it was just gibberish to me.
Later, I was not allowed to watch Green Acres. My parents said it was "rubbish". I did not see an episode of it till I went to college, and eagerly watched to see what I had been missing. I lasted 10 minutes - it was indeed rubbish.
I have a strong feeling this account is a bot.
I would always get a summer writing slump. Write nothing at all from june to august then I couldn’t read my own handwriting. My poor teachers.
PBS is a national treasure.
is this news?
Does it have to be?
It really felt like propaganda as a kid.
Made me think reading was probably a scam.
Sure was buddy
Big Book out to get u
(How the fuck did you know what "propaganda" was before you could even read btw?)
Ask a parent! Kids can be very wary of attempts to "shape" them. Of course they're not going to know the word propaganda, but the instinct to detect manipulation (and react negatively to it) goes deep.
Indeed. Also, small kids are excellent bullshit detectors. They can tell when they're being given non-sequiturs, or explanations are inconsistent, and they (rightfully) see this as problem and are confused when such things come from sources they trust (e.g. parents).
I am always fascinated by this degree of assurance and absolute lack of scepticism.
In what way, do you think, a show can have no room for critical viewing? Does being related to "reading or books" sufficient for such unquestionable and noncritical acceptance? Or was something else about it that makes it so cocksure good?
Watching Mr. Rogers as an adult, I was surprised by how opinionated the show could be. There was an episode where one of the puppets was trying to teach a child puppet to read before they entered school, and it was presented as a extremely harsh and mean way to treat a child. A human actor comes in and starts scolding the puppet that it's not necessary to teach the kids to read before school and that she needs to stop. Later, Mr. Rogers talks with an actual kindergarten teacher, and they discuss how it's completely unnecessary to teach kids to read before they enter kindergarten.
It felt like it was indoctrinating kids into believing that the right way to raise them was the way that Fred Rogers preferred.
There's this strange point of view that once it's decided that something is good and it's being made by good people, it's absurd to look at it critically and anyone who does should be mocked.
Okay, I don't think that was it.
I think the one you are talking about is Episode 1462.
In Episode 1462 Lady Elaine is badgering people for not knowing all their letters and numbers etc before showing up for school.
The point is not about knowing them before you show up, the point is about addressing learning anxiety!
The point of that section is to tell children that if they don't know these things before they first show up at school, that it's not the end of the world!
Different kids are going to come from different backgrounds, this segment addresses that so when kids show up to school and don't know these things, that they don't feel stressed and upset that other kids may know something they don't. That is something they can turn a kid off from school and wanting to learn forever.
Were in a place where you learned things like that before you ever went to school? If so, that can cause resentment!
The episode only portrays education before school in a negative light, though. It's message isn't "it's fine to teach kids before they enter school and after they enter school, but you shouldn't badger them." Characters continually say that it's wrong to try to teach kids these things before they enter school, or that if a kid doesn't want to learn them before they enter school parents are wrong to try.
In 1462, look at around 12:30, Elaine is trying to teach Tuesday, who doesn't want to learn, he wants to leave. So Mr. McFeely objects by saying that Tuesday doesn't need to learn them before he goes to school.
Then look at 17:15. Elaine says that Tuesday needs to study, and Aberlin immediately objects saying that he hasn't started school yet. When Elaine says that school is about learning numbers and letters, Aberlin says that that's not true "according to the real teacher." Followed by Mr. Rogers saying that Elaine thinks that everything about school needs to be hard and boring, and that's just not the way it is. But "parents trying to teach you about numbers and letters just want things to be hard and boring" isn't a good message, to say the least.
You're right that Elaine is portrayed as being mean, but that's part of the problem. It feels very much like a negative caricature. No one is saying "here's a good way to teach kids before school," they're all saying "don't be so mean, they don't need to learn these things."
I don't feel so easy about a show teaching very young children that their preferred approach to child rearing is morally correct and other approaches are morally wrong.
(Thanks for a link to the episodes, by the way. 1462 and 1463.)
I think you're taking away a different message from what I did, I watch 1462 and 1463 looking for this section.
The message I got was not "don't learn this stuff before school", the message I took away was that, for a lot of kids watching that show on PBS, especially around the air date of 1979, you were looking at "latchkey kids" plus the incredible struggles of poverty and access to information.
It wasn't "don't learn this", it was "you are not less of a human being because you were born into a family that didn't or couldn't take the time to help teach you these things before you started school". That was the takeaway, for me, and for a lot of the kids I grew up around that weren't privileged.
But it's not showing that. You could have two kids start school at the same time and say that it's OK that they didn't have different backgrounds. But that's not what they showed - they're showing people who are telling Elaine it's wrong to teach the kids when the kids want to go off and play.
> "you are not less of a human being because you were born into a family that didn't or couldn't take the time to help teach you these things before you started school"
But Elaine does want to teach the kids in this episode. I don't see how this episode would do anything other than encourage fewer parents to try to teach their kids before they go off to school.
"I don't see how this episode would do anything other than encourage fewer parents to try to teach their kids before they go off to school."
You're so far outside the typical audience for this show!
Think more along the lines of poverty with no parents at home, maybe they're both working, or maybe one is incarcerated!
This show sure wasn't put together for young kids of privilege and financial and community support and means - the exactly opposite.
That is a Waldorf perspective, though presumably not exclusive to them. I was sent to a Waldorf kindergarten, and my mother despised it because they repeatedly insulted her for having taught me to read. They felt this was unhealthy.
Independent of Waldorf, kindergarten teachers - like most teachers - don't like it when their students already know the material they're supposed to be teaching.
> Independent of Waldorf, kindergarten teachers - like most teachers - don't like it when their students already know the material they're supposed to be teaching.
Yes, "don't do it that way, you're not suppose to know that yet" is depressingly common. Also unfair, since it usually only applies to certain kids - we don't tell artistic kids that they shouldn't paint so well, because kids aren't supposed to be at that level yet, nor do we tell athletic kids this. But it's extremely common in subjects like math.
One of the things that's frustrating is the one size fits all mentality when it comes to education. Even if some kids don't get a lot out of home education, some really enjoy it, and it can be a great bonding experience for many parents and children. It feels irresponsible to dismiss it all together.
> we don't tell artistic kids that they shouldn't paint so well, because kids aren't supposed to be at that level yet, nor do we tell athletic kids this. But it's extremely common in subjects like math.
It's even more common as applied to holding a job, which is out-and-out illegal for children in most cases.
You're talking about, I believe, Episode 1463 - Mr Rogers goes to school.
I found it in the internet archive here: https://archive.org/details/ipoy143season10
Edit: The correct episode in question is Ep 1462.
> absolute lack of scepticism.
Mostly being around 4-6 years old and generally having trust in the people around you.
That was just the vibe.
It was mandatory watching by the state education program. It had product placement and a clear message.
I mean, I feel like it would take more education to not see it as propaganda.
I didn't like The Magic Schoolbus either though. Same reason.
Oh, and Scholastic everything.
I've only seen Magic School Bus as an adult, but I don't recall any product placement? They seem fun and educational - like Storybots.
Only problem I have with those shows for kids is the lack of real people.
i felt like a lot of my teachers kept it handy in the "fucking hungover" pocket too
Well, good work avoiding that scam. I guess. Does this make you Goofus or Gallanyt?
It sure was neat when people aspired to help kids learn instead of being completely focused on them not learning the wrong thing.
I think if you back and watch these 90s PBS shows you’ll find they are also very overt in promoting their ideas.
Summer reading programs are a band-aid on the problem that children shouldn’t have such a long summer break now that air conditioning is common. Spread the breaks out throughout the year if you want to maintain the same number of days off. All evidence shows the summer break is bad for children’s academic achievement (especially poor children), but it is viewed as a perk for the teachers so the teacher’s unions fight against questioning it.
Let’s say summer break is basically 3 months. I as a parent need to figure out childcare for that 3 month period at the beginning of summer. This is a much more time consuming endeavor than most would expect (or at least more than I expected). If you distribute those months throughout the year I need to repeat this process 3 different times, adding a bunch of overhead that could be spent on activities more beneficial to my family and kids.
Edit: Adding that I realize the summer slowdown absolutely exists and has a disproportionate effect on those that don’t need another wrench thrown in their life. But just wanted to add a perspective that isn’t “teacher union boogeyman”.
Not every school has air-conditioning however.
And there are schools that do year-round schedules, but the total time off is about the same. They will typically get a longer winter break, longer spring break, an additional fall break, and then a much shortened summer break, but those add up to about the same time off overall. I know many teachers who prefer that system, some because it means they get paychecks more consistently throughout the year, and also it gives you more spread out breaks and flexibility in taking trips instead of being locked in to summer/Christmas/one week in the spring.
The strongest push back to this schedule is in fact parents. The primary issue is once their kids are in different schools (high school / middle school / elementary) with different schedules this causes issues as kids are not longer on break at the same times. In addition summer camp programs are tied to the traditional schedule leaving kids in the year round schedule with fewer or no options.
In order to change it, you also need neighboring districts/communities/private schools/programming to all shift as well, otherwise it becomes too much of as hassle for parents & teachers.
Air conditioning is common, but at least in some regions, it would be a tremendous expense for the the school to condition their buildings for occupation during the summer. And many buildings were designed around the summer break, so they may not have capacity to condition the buildings for occupation during the summer; this is not without its problems as some buildings end up being unfit for occupation during the school year, especially as the climate gets less consistent. There's probably some opportunity for savings in places where increasing hours during the summer could result in decreasing hours in the winter, though.
I think there's some cultural value in having a shared experience of summer vacation. But I agree, breaking up the breaks throughout the year, where possible, would make a lot of sense. There's a benefit of less crowding when school districts have different weeks off; although it's harder for extended families to meet up when their school schedules are drastically different.
That assumes academic achievement should be the primary aim of childhood. What I learned in school was incredibly important—don’t get me wrong—but what I learned over the summer was arguably more important.
As a child of divorce, I cherished 6 straight weeks at my mom’s house (we only visited every other weekend during school). As a working class kid, I earned probably half my annual spending money over the summer.
My wife and I now have kids, and we’ve always loved to travel (and needed to just to visit family). Summer is the only time available for extended family trips (2+ weeks).
In other words, any time spent outside of school is time wasted?
We've cut the music and art in schools too. I guess the end state is one long endless math class. I'm sure those kids will be well adjusted.
It is the only vacation most teachers get, so of course they fight against shortening it
The argument wasn't for shortening it, but for distributing it through the year. I have never in my adult life taken 10 consecutive weeks off, and 5 two-week breaks would still be very generous.
Maybe summer break also has some value for the joy it brings to children? Their lives shouldn't just be preparation for adulthood, it's worth making childhood enjoyable too.
I'm torn. I see lots of value in reading (for both kids and adults!), but at some point, there also needs to be emphasis on doing.
How is reading different from doing. This is about encouraging children to read, it’s a very active process. Maybe I‘m missing something?
Just to argue reading vs doing: I know lots of heavy readers who can't absolutely do something new. They only read and read.
On the other hand, doing is a totally different skillset.
I'm not against reading just that it's very unlike doing something in general.
What does doing even mean here? Cutting the grass? Building a tree house?
No need to be black and white.
Reading can be active, if I'm taking notes on nonfiction its a somewhat active process.
Reading can be passive, if I'm cruising on a fiction book.
It is doing, but it's doing one thing: reading. Encouraging kids to read makes sense for building literacy and encouraging imagination, but there's a point where enough is enough, reading the 6th installment of Harry Potter is for entertainment, and they're better off riding a bike, building something, and making friends.
It's the same for adults. We blindly praise reading, but much of it belongs on the shelf at an airport bookstore, it's not particularly challenging or informing, and it might as well be video games or TV.
Doing what? Just whatever? As long as they aren't doing any reading?
They should also replace lunch period with a "life" period. I see a lot of kids sitting around eating, getting fat, but kids need experience in real life; eating will get them nowhere.
Reading is doing when it involves active engagement - kids who read deeply are processing, imagining, questioning, and building mental models they later apply to real-world problems.
How do you propose that should look?
The whole show is to motivate people to want to pick up a book, which to me sounds like an emphasis on doing.
If you’d replace this with posters or shows that just say “READ A BOOK”, it would not be as effective.
porque no los dos?