New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has a column last week about Wood, Microsoft's former marketing director who quit to deliver books into the hands of the world's most literate-deprived populations.

"It all began in 1998 when Wood...chanced upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children,'' Kristoff writes. "Only one problem: It had no books to speak of." So Wood promised to remedy that problem and and "eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys."

The children were ecstatic and Wood was so deeply affected that he quit his job and launched Room to Read to deliver books to farflung villages around the globe. So far he's created 12,000 libraries and continues to do so at the rate of six a day. Room To Read also educates 13,500 impoverished girls worldwide at an annual cost of $250 per child.

"Our 50-year goal is to reverse the notion that any child can be told ‘you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and so you will not get educated," Wood tells Kristoff. "That idea belongs on the scrapheap of human history.”

Kristoff muses in his column: "So many American efforts to influence foreign countries have misfired... We launch missiles, dispatch troops, rent foreign puppets and spend billions without accomplishing much. In contrast, schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow."

One of the corrupt in Congress ought to award Wood's charity a big Pentagon contract so he can spread his revolution of learning worldwide.