[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 135 (Wednesday, October 25, 2000)]
[House]
[Page H10878]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Sawyer) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SAWYER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join with the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Hinojosa) and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. 
Etheridge) in their interest in the subject of education.
  We are fond of pointing out the absolute truth that education is a 
local function. It is a State responsibility. But from time to time in 
our Nation's history, it has become an overarching national concern. 
Such a time occurred a little over a hundred years ago as the United 
States emerged from what was largely an agrarian era in this Nation's 
history, a time when half of all of Americans lived and worked on farms 
because it took that many of us to feed and clothe all of us, to the 
entrance into the second industrial revolution.
  It changed everything. Mechanized manufacturing and agriculture and 
transportation made it possible for cities to grow in ways that had 
never ever occurred before, and it changed the skill expectations of an 
entire country. It was a time when we really faced the challenge of 
elevating the skill level of an entire Nation from one end of the 
spectrum to another, all at the same time. That is an extraordinary 
undertaking in the life of any nation, and we have been through it. It 
was a time of overarching national concern.
  The land grant colleges changed the way we educated people for 
nation-building here in the United States. Normal schools improved the 
education of teachers who, up to that point, the majority of whom had 
barely gotten beyond high school themselves when they were teaching 
high school. It was done through a partnership of local, State and 
Federal activity, and it really was a reinvention of America. It was 
the invention of the American century.
  Today we find ourselves in a time of very similar change. Technology 
today is changing everything. We are seeing a time when the need has 
expanded in very much the same way as it did a hundred years ago.
  Today we are finding an entire generation of baby boom teachers who 
began their careers in the late 1960s and early 1970s moving toward 
retirement, at the same time that the largest school age population in 
the Nation's history is moving through our classrooms, breaking 
enrollment records every year and likely to again for the next 12 to 15 
years.
  All of this is happening at a time when we are seeing the greatest 
shift in job skills expectation that we have seen in this country 
perhaps since that time 100 or 110 years ago when we became a new 
country.
  We see at the same time that school buildings, some tired, many worn 
out, often obsolete, buildings that were at least in, close to a third 
of which were built prior to the Great Depression, coming into a time 
of extreme challenge and expectation. That is the circumstance that we 
face today. It is what the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. 
Etheridge) was talking about. It is what the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Hinojosa) was talking about.
  This is not a crisis, but it is a time when we need to understand 
those needs. We have been through that any number of times since 100 
years ago when we put together the Land Grant Colleges Acts. We have 
seen it in the G.I. bill when millions of men came home from the Second 
World War, a war fought with some 23 percent high school graduates. It 
was not until 1951 that we saw half of all Americans graduating from 
high school. Today those numbers are up into the mid-80s, and the 
performance of minority populations are the highest they have ever 
been.
  We saw that kind of cooperation in the National Defense Education Act 
in the wake of Sputnik and in title I for the educationally 
disadvantaged in the 1960s, the development of special education in the 
mid-1970s, the adult education programs that have grown in need and 
performance in the course of this decade alone.

                              {time}  1845

  And we have seen college aid, through financial loans and grants, 
change the face of higher education in the United States. It has not 
happened just because it is possible; it has happened because it has 
been necessary. It has been necessary as we seek to change the face of 
the Nation yet again.
  We need to develop a whole new cohort of well-qualified teachers and 
to assist in the financing of a new school construction and renovation 
plan that will make it possible for this largest generation of school 
learners to take part in that education. This is not something we do 
simply because we think it would be nice. As we stand here trying to 
seek to extend the kind of prosperity that we enjoy today through 
paying down the national debt, through extending the solvency of Social 
Security, there is no better way we can do that than through ensuring 
the skill levels of a new Nation.
  Our children will have to learn as if their entire world depended on 
it, because it does. Their world and our world.

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