>Her original goal was to improve literacy rates. Targeting children under 5 seems like a strange way to approach this. Why? Don't children have to learn to r

>Her original goal was to improve literacy rates. Targeting children under 5 seems like a strange way to approach this. Why? Don't children have to learn to read before you can measure literacy at all? Learning to read versus learning to love to read is definitely as you stated a matter of motivation, but these days kids are learning to read younger and younger due to screen time. I too come from a well read family but in contrast to your example of not really getting motivated until 4th grade I learned to love to read before school started. By the time second grade rolled around my teacher would ask me to read to the class and then go stand in the doorway chit chatting with the teacher from the next classroom over. And like you it was a gateway into a lifelong love of reading. Reading requires opportunity and motive. Dolly Parton is supplying the opportunity and since when kids start to read is all over the map, creating it early for those who will pick it up is not wrong. From my perspective and to paraphrase you: denying children under [the age of] 5 seems like a strange way to approach this.