If I might...I don't think it's so much an opportunity, because opportunity abounds. I think it's a hunger. I don't even know if you can force a child to it, and it isn't necessarily a kind thing to do, but if the field is fertile the seed will grow.
I can tell you how it happened to me. I was blessed with parents who read to me since infancy, and their monetary investment was nearly nil - a library card, and a decent library to back it. The investment was time, and I know now with one of them gone that it was the most precious thing they had to give.
There was a single, soul-stirring moment that I have remembered across five decades. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, public library - I was eight, taken by the hand from the delightful, intimate, low-ceilinged children's library and up the old, marble steps we walked to a place I'd never been. It was the most enormous room I'd ever been in, two stories high and what seems in memory miles long, one floor connected to the next with black wrought-iron spiral staircases and nothing but books as far as the eye could see. I think that Heaven must look something like that. I don't remember now if it was Mom, or Dad, or both, but what they said was "now go find something to read."
Do that, and college won't matter.
Ahhh... You’ve brought tears to my eyes. What lovely, warm pictures you bring to my mind.
My earliest reading came from being a child and with the neighborhood kids having a pool – somewhat novel then to my neighborhood – outside my bedroom window. For whatever reason (and that doctors couldn't figure at that time), I should not have been in contact with sunlight.
My dad, born to sharecroppers, would bring me a book once every two weeks or so to compensate the loss of sun.
He could not read.
He was, however, the greatest man I’ve ever known. He taught me not only the reasons it would profit me to search and learn, but the pleasure of reading itself. The importance of understanding others and different worlds, he stressed.
If, as you term it, "hunger" were the problem, we'd never see it. I still believe today that the problem is opportunity.
You were blessed with parents who wanted to see you educated, as was I.
The problem I have is that many "parents" today would love to see their own down in the gutter and would go so far as to place his/her foot upon that throat to keep that child there for the sake of a food stamp/welfare check.
And there's my question. "How do I blame any child for not having more opportunity -- no matter the form of opportunity?"
I apologise if this in rude form. I certainly don't intend it to be... just not sure how to say what I mean other than saying what I mean!
God Bless,
S.C.