Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Earns One Million Dollars In Less Than a Day

An anonymous reader writes "LeVar Burton and the rest of the Reading Rainbow crew opened a Kickstarter campaign to bring back Reading Rainbow yesterday, with the ambitious goal of collecting a million dollars for their cause. They are now at almost two million dollars, with over a month left to go. 'This Kickstarter campaign is about reaching every web-connected child. Universal access. Thousands of more books than what we have now. And hundreds of more video field trips,' Burton said."

Two Problems

[Stormy Dragon]

As much as I loved Reading Rainbow growing up, I have two problems with this:

1. If you go to their website, nothing indicates this is a non-profit corporation.
2. None of the people involved has a background in education, child development, psychology, etc.

Awesome

[m.dillon]

Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.

-Matt

feel the love

[troll -1]

I wonder what implications being able to raise money for a common cause like this will have on the future of business. Will the top corporations of tomorrow be crowdfunded by people commonly wanting a particular good or service? What happens if you add virtual currency and 3D printers into the mix? Is this what Alan Watts was talking about when he referred to money as being an illusion? It's all in your head, man. Da future.

Re:Two Problems

[just_another_sean]

Yeah, except this guy is not a dim wit and my Star Trek fanboy nonsense aside, go take a look at his record [wikipedia.org]. LeVar Burton has been involved in encouraging kids to read and generally expand their knowledge since the 80's. He's not doing this for himself, he genuinely cares about this. He's by no means a a multi-bajillionaire from working in Hollywood but he certainly doesn't need the money (is he even getting anything out of this other than some facetime on the interwebs?).

If he can use some of his geek cache to help kids get an education outside of our broken school system than more power to him. This isn't Madonna or Angelina adopting a kid from Somali because it's suddenly fashionable to do so, this is a guy who has been passionate about kids education since he was young lending his semi-famous name to a good and worthy cause.

On the web? Really?

[damn_registrars]

I'm not sure this will really meet the ambitions of the previous series. If we want to get all kids to read more, we really need the medium that reaches the most children. The web is great and all, but public television is available to far more people for far less money. Kids that are in the most critical target audience for this likely won't have their own devices to watch this online and will have to convince their parents to let them watch it instead of letting Daddy continue with his half-life 7 marathon or mommy with her endless facebook chatter.