After about 20 years of reporting on the news, I’ve written my first Op-Ed. The opinion, published today in The Seattle Times: the chance to learn to read and write should be a fundamental right in the U.S. because literacy makes all other rights meaningful.

Children with brains re-engineered for reading can think the thoughts and feel the feelings of others who have lived different lives than their own, even if they lived long ago or far away. Children who can learn from what they read may claim humanity’s accumulated culture, knowledge and wisdom, which is their birthright.

Perhaps they will increase that inheritance.

But without that re-engineering, children can expect to live shorter, less healthy, less happy and less prosperous lives than their better educated fellow citizens.