Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.
First thing... THIS is how you do a kickstarter.
This is the kind of thing that kickstarter can be great at, and do great things with; being done by people who understand their medium and their audience, and who design their campaign properly around it.
If this doesn't become one of the most overfunded kickstarters in history, I would be amazed.
I've been watching it for about 2 hours, and it's gone from $100k to over $500k in that time.
... And this is something I'm backing... even as little as I can afford right now. It's a good idea, and it's something I'd like to see done. I can't do much, but I pledged... It's the price of a cup of coffee or a little more than a gallon of gas. You should too if you can.
Anything we can do to increase the net level of education, intelligence, and reading in this country... on this planet... we should be doing. If it's a smart, well designed, well implemented way of doing so, even better.
Long term, I'd like to see what their fee schedule and sustainability model is, are they organizing long term as for profit, not for profit etc... but let's get this off the ground at the very least.
Now... for my more skeptical, and more conservative friends and readers... yes, liberals, education blah blah blah.
THIS IS A GOOD THING - IGNORE THE POLITICS
This is an essentially libertarian thing, using the power of private enterprise and initiative, and the power of market preference, to fund education.
WE WANT MORE OF THIS. LOTS MORE OF THIS.
There is one specific issue that I personally have a problem with... but I can get over it, because I understand the issue, and why it's presented as it is.
So for my fellow skeptics, and numbers geeks...
Ignore the claim that 25% of children don't learn to read in this country...
That is not an outright lie... it's also not the absolute truth. It's a matter of how we define literacy, and to what degree we count someone literate based on that definition.
That's a concept that takes more than 30 seconds, and more than one paragraph to explain... so it gets simplified here as "1 in 4 children don't learn to read".
It a political number, not a real number. A classic example of using definitions to make things scarier, to emphasize the problem.
Don't let that stop you from the core message here, or from supporting what looks to be an excellent idea.
Oh and, be sure to watch the video to the very end... priceless...
