Save the Children

Two weeks ago an article by Nicholas Kristof, “Remember the Homeless Chess Champion? The Boy is Now a Chess Master,” in the New York Times Review caught my eye. It was probably because I had recently watched the Netflix version of “The Queen’s Gambit.” But the article was about much more than chess. It was about children who are “discovered” and helped, and children who are not. “Talent is universal, while opportunity is not,” writes Kristof.

As someone who spent her career at community colleges, institutions founded to provide universal opportunity, his message struck a chord. I remember one alumna’s poignant story. She described telling her junior high school guidance counselor that she wanted to enroll in the college prep high school curriculum. He laughed. The gist of his response was that because she was a girl and the child of immigrants, no opportunity for higher education was open to her. Her qualifications were irrelevant. In a wonderful twist of fate, she became a secretary and typed the legislation that founded community colleges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Opportunity was hers at last and years later she delivered an inspiring commencement speech. She was in the right place at the right time to turn her fortune around.

Because Kristof wrote about the young chess player, readers donated over $250,000 and a year of free housing. But, as Kristof writes, “We need to support all children…That requires policy as well as philanthropy.”  According to Kristof, “President Biden’s proposed investments in children…would revolutionize opportunity for all struggling children.” I wish I could believe that even those who oppose aid as “handouts” will realize the injustice of punishing children for circumstances they do not control and for the structural inequities in our social and economic systems. But I doubt it. In my post, Merit? I wrote about how successful people often believe that they “earned” their success, without acknowledging how their privilege began at birth. They will claim that the price tag for extending the opportunity they were afforded to all children is too high. I would love to be proven wrong.