"Where you would find money to spend on books, time to spend on reading, when all you care about is how to get money not to starve?"

Oh man, I am from Spain. I believe you need to get out of your country for a while.

There are few places in which I had seen more misery than in the US of America, India comes to mind. There some people live very well, the rest very bad.

Spain is somewhat a socialist country, you are paid for not working, with lots of subsidies, like PER or paro, education and healthcare for the poor are free. Also lots of taxes.

Spain exports food, there is plenty of it. If you are poor there are lots of rural places where you are given land free if you want to work it(as small villages get empty when population gets older).

In Spain(and Italy) family is much more important than in the US, so it has a wide social net.

Maybe you need to travel more around in your own country.

Not everyone has a family to fall on or gets the expected help from the social institutions.

I travel regularly in Spain and am aware of such situations.

Yeah, but the recession is a fairly recent thing, while current adults received most of their education in the past decades.

Well speaking for Portugal, we have had education cuts since around 2000.

Unless you live in big cities, there are also not that many libraries to go to, or the possibility to connect to the Internet in a workable manner.

Sure, when one wants to learn, even with limited resources, they might try to. However, the majority just won't bother.

Yeah, I'm aware (fellow countryman here ;), but as far as I know Spain hasn't had our eternal crisis. In fact, I believe they had a decent surplus for a number of years.

The problem with Spain is that every time a new government is elected they decide to change the education system. And not for a better one. So there's no plan for the near future, and the investment of R&D is ridiculous and inefficient (half of the funds are never granted). The best of the best have to leave the country.