I love the Literacy Site, and all the sites associated with it. Simply by clicking on the button in the middle of the page, and those of its sister sites (which are tabbed at the top: The Hunger Site, the Breast Cancer Site, the Rainforest site, the Child Health site, and the Animal Rescue site), broadband users can
* provide a cup of food to a hungry person,
* help fund a mammogram,
* preserve 11.4 square feet of endangered rainforest,
* help fund basic health care for kids,
* help provide reading material to kids, and
* help animals in distress,
all in less than a minute, from the comfort of their own chairs. The Hunger Site launched during the dot-com boom, and busted when everything else did. But now it’s back, along with the peers described above, and it’s simply the most ingenious use of advertising dollars I know.
It’s great. But today, when I got to the Literacy Site, I cringed. Appropriating the old ‘You always remember your first _____’ motif (kiss, lover, car, etc.), someone at the Literacy Site wrote, “You always remember your first book.”
Actually, if parents are doing their jobs, their kids should have no idea what their first book was. They should have encountered it when they were too young to form serial memories, and it should have been followed by countless others, so that the first one faded into the dim past. Of course, that’s not how it always is for kids – but it’s how it ought to be.
So please remember to click on the Literacy Site each day, to ensure that kids get enough books, early enough, so they have no chance of remembering them.