    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [July 5, 1993]
    [Pages 1008-1015]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Education Association in San Francisco,
    California
    July 5, 1993

        Thank you very much. Thank you for the warm reception you gave to
    the First Lady and to Secretary Riley. Thank you for inviting me back.
        You know, last year when we were in Washington I was out in the
    crowd over there by the Nebraska delegation. Where are the Nebraska
    teachers this year, over there? And where are the teachers from
    Arkansas? Over there. Thank you. Always a rowdy group. [Laughter]
        I want to thank all of you who teach our children, staff our
    schools, lead our communities, and build our future. I am very grateful
    for the support you gave in the campaign of 1992, grateful for the
    support and the work you continue to do as we work our way through the
    changes this Nation has to make in the Congress and in the country. But
    most of all, I want to say at the outset, what I tried to say all along
    the way last year: Perhaps more than any person who ever sought this
    job, I spent my apprenticeship in the schools of my State, in the
    schools of this country, listening to teachers talking with children,
    learning from principals, trying to inspire people everywhere to work
    together for reform. And I want to thank you most of all for your clear
    and simple devotion to the work of teaching.
        While I was thinking about this speech, I received a quote from the
    novel, ``The Prince of Tides.'' Secretary Riley gave it to me. I want to
    give him full credit. He'll probably have to take the blame for a thing
    or two along the way. [Laughter] But I love the ``Prince of Tides'';
    it's my favorite novel I guess I've read in the last decade or so. And
    the main character is a teacher named Tom. There's a passage in the book
    that I remember vividly where he's asked why he chose to, quote, ``sell
    himself short'' when he was so talented and he could have done anything
    with his life. He replied, and I quote from Pat Conroy's eloquence:
    ``There's no word in the language I revere more than `teacher'. My heart
    sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've
    honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.''
        I am delighted to be here with so many distinguished Californians,
    in addition to the teachers: Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Pelosi,
    Congressman Lantos, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Congresswoman Lynn
    Woolsey, Speaker Willie Brown, controller Gray  Davis,  secretary  of
    state  March Fong Eu, insurance commissioner John Garamendi, Mayor Frank
    Jordan, Brad Sherman, and many others. To all those folks who are here
    in our administration and to Keith Geiger and all the people who work
    for you in Washington, I have a special word of thanks to the NEA for
    the gift of our Assistant Secretary for the Office of Education and
    Research and Improvement, Dr. Sharon Robinson, who is also here today.
        For the past 5 months all of us have been working hard with you to
    change our country and to build our future. The film that you so
    graciously put together shows some of the progress that has been made;
    the family leave bill; the motor voter bill; a tough ethics set of rules
    for the executive branch; one House of Congress having already passed
    finally a lobby reform bill that requires all lobbyists to register

    [[Page 1009]]

    and to report what they spend on Members of Congress; and a campaign
    finance reform bill that lowers the cost of campaigns and opens the
    airwaves to honest debate and reduces the influence of organized groups;
    a new environmental policy, which puts the United States at the head,
    instead of at the rear of the environmental movement that is sweeping
    the globe. We did reverse the gag rule and the ban on fetal tissue
    research, which was undermining diabetes and Parkinson's and other
    medical research so critical to the health and the welfare and the
    future of the United States.
        There is much more to be done. Soon we will pass the economic
    program. Soon we will begin in earnest an attempt to provide health
    security and to control health care costs and to provide quality health
    care to every American family. Soon we will have the Vice President's
    recommendations on how we can literally reinvent our National Government
    so that we can reduce the amount of regulation and increase the
    empowerment we give to people at the local level and free up funds not
    only to bring our deficit down but to invest in people instead of the
    constant expansion of yesterday's Government.
        These things are very important. And already, in spite of the fact
    that most Americans are still having a very tough time and are very
    insecure in this tough global economy, the fact that our economic
    program is two-thirds home has led to a dramatic reduction in interest
    rates, which has caused millions of people to refinance their home
    mortgages and save them a whole lot more money in lower interest than
    the middle class will be asked to pay to bring this deficit down and
    leave us some modest funds to invest in education and our future.
        We have already seen in 5 months nearly one million jobs added to
    this economy. It is not enough. It is nowhere near where we should be
    coming out of the so-called bottom of the recession, now nearly 2 years
    ago. But it is a beginning, and it indicates that we are moving along
    the right track.
        In a few hours I will be traveling to Tokyo to attend the annual
    summit of the world's largest industrial nations. A foreign summit with
    all of its protocol, its interpreters, its communiques, seems awfully
    remote to most Americans' lives and probably seems remote to the work
    most of you do in our schools. But in fact, the work that I will be
    doing in the next few days and the work that you do every day are
    closely related, for we have entered an era where the line between our
    domestic policy and our foreign policy has completely evaporated.
        Today I want to take a few moments to explain to you what this trip
    is about, how it relates to what you do, and the goals that we all share
    for our country. Like your work in the schools, this trip is about
    crafting our future. Its goals are our prosperity and security in a
    tough global economy.
        Forty-five years ago at the end of the cold war, President Harry
    Truman and a generation of visionary leaders realized we had entered a
    new age that demanded new policies and new institutions. They built NATO
    to deter Soviet aggression. They created international financial
    institutions to help to rebuild Europe and Japan and promote global
    economic growth.
        Now our generation after the cold war must create a new vision, new
    policies, and new agreements to enable the world's nations to prosper.
    We cannot long continue to promote democracy when Europe is having the
    slowest economic growth in 20 years, Japan facing the slowest economic
    growth in four decades, and America over 3 million jobs behind where we
    ought to be at this point in our development, still with the strongest
    economy of all these industrialized nations. We can do better, and we
    must. You think about every one of your schools with every financial
    problem you've got. If every American who wanted a job had one, and we
    were growing this economy, the money would be there to pay our teachers,
    to invest in our schools, to give our kids a better life.
        A generation ago, our students prepared themselves for a working
    world dominated by large corporations and heavy manufacturing industries
    which competed with each other and the United States, but suffered no
    foreign competitors and could dominate the international markets they
    chose to enter. Today they enter a high-tech information revolution
    spearheaded by flexible entrepreneurial firms, both large and small,
    that are networked through computers with their suppliers and their
    customers all around the world. They enter a world where everybody's
    job, directly or indirectly, is affected by global competition. In this
    economy, money and management and technology are incredibly mobile, and
    a nation's well-being depends largely on the skills of its work force
    and the capacity of the people to adapt and be productive.

    [[Page 1010]]

        A generation ago, students planned for lifetime careers with one
    company. Today's graduates can expect to change jobs six or seven times
    in a lifetime, even if they stay with one company. Before they reach
    retirement, always in conjunction with other workers in the world, they
    will be in constant competition. And we must face the hard fact that
    many of the people with whom we compete for the high-wage, high-growth
    jobs are uniformly more thoroughly prepared to begin their work than our
    people are.
        The European Community will require fluency in two foreign languages
    for high school graduates by the year 2000. Germany has one of the most
    well-developed youth apprenticeship programs in the world. The rigor of
    Japan's public school system is legendary. We know that we, too, have
    our strengths, and we know that we, too, are challenged in ways that no
    other nation is. No other nation with which we compete for this future
    has so many diverse cultures, so many diverse ethnic groups, so many
    diverse religious groups, and so many poor children that we are trying
    to educate all the way through high school. No other nation has anything
    like the system of higher education that we do, and we should be proud
    of that as well.
        But if you look at the challenges we face, if you look at the
    results faced here in California by big companies and trying to secure
    qualified employees, if you look at the challenges faced by the children
    that go to school in this State in some of the toughest neighborhoods in
    America every day, we still have to say that these things can be
    challenges to us, but they can never be excuses. For the global economy
    is here to stay. We can't wish it away. We can't hide from it, and no
    political leader can promise to protect you from it. We simply have to
    compete, not retreat, and we have to do it while maintaining our
    position of world leadership. That means your job and my job are
    fundamentally intertwined. And unless we both do it very well, this
    country cannot be what it ought to be.
        Now, there are people who believe that the situation is all bad and
    that our best days are behind us, and we're not going to do what we need
    to do. I think they're dead wrong. We are better positioned for this new
    world than most people think. The new economy is built on information
    and innovation. We are an innovative people with a passion for
    information technology that dates all the way back to the first
    telegraph and the first telephone and is found today in millions of
    American homes.
        The new global economy is built on flexibility and constant change.
    We are a people whose open society and open political system embrace
    change more energetically than any other nation. The new global economy
    is based on interacting and doing business with the people all over the
    world, understanding their economies, their societies, and their
    languages. We are a nation of immigrants. We have two centuries of
    experience in building bridges across the lines of race and religion and
    culture. One county in this State has people from 150 different racial
    and ethnic groups. We can meet the challenges of the global economy, and
    we will.
        This new economy is based on high productivity. And after faltering
    in the seventies and the early eighties, our productivity growth is once
    again making America the high-quality, low-cost producer in many areas.
    American automobiles in the last year have been regaining market share
    in the United States, something people thought would never happen. Why?
    Because they're the best cars at the most reasonable price. And we can
    do that in many other areas.
        Of course, we have problems. We still lose a stunning number of our
    children to poverty, to drugs, to violence. Too many of them simply
    never learn enough to compete and win. Too many, indeed, can barely
    function in a highly organized and flexible society.
        For more than a decade, our policies ignored these problems. We ran
    up huge deficits, not to invest in our children and our future but huge
    deficits that mortgaged our future, weakened our economy. And all the
    while we actually reduced our investments in education and technology
    and the things that make a country strong. We mortgaged our future by
    rewarding speculation over savings, by cutting taxes on the wealthy
    while we raised them on the middle class, by failing to invest in those
    things which really count in the long run.
        But we are turning that around. We are getting our house in order.
    We are putting the steel back into our competitive edge. But the job
    that the President has in doing this is no different than the job you
    have faced in your classroom hundreds, indeed, thousands of times if
    you've been a teacher long enough. A lot of people don't want to hear
    what you have to say, to do what it takes to learn what they need to
    know. [Applause] Thank you.

    [[Page 1011]]

        How many times have you been in a classroom when you had to say
    something that was genuinely challenging and tough to a single student
    or to a whole class, and they would simply resist and resist and resist
    it. That's what's going on in this country today, isn't it? Our people
    have been told what they wanted to hear for so long, instead of what it
    really takes to make it, that there is a natural resistance, one which I
    understand and do not begrudge. For 12 years, voters have been spoon-fed
    pablum. They've been told that there was a free ride. There was a free
    ride. If only if we would cut somebody else's program, if only we would
    blame someone else, you can have it all. You can have your lower taxes
    and all the projects you want, and we'll just cut it somewhere else.
        Well, the people of California know better. They know that we had to
    and we should welcome the opportunity to cut defense spending at the end
    of the cold war. But that means tough choices like closing bases and
    reducing contracts. And if there is no plan to invest in the people that
    are left behind, then an awful lot of unfair harm will be done. So if
    you're going to make the tough decision, you have to level with the
    people, and then forge ahead to try to make something good happen.
        But I've heard all these siren songs about how ``it's spending,
    stupid.'' Well, let me tell you something: In our budget, which cuts
    $500 billion from the deficit, half of it comes from spending cuts. We
    have a hard freeze on domestic spending over the next 5 years, even
    though we spend more money in some things you and I care about. We
    reduced defense spending as much as we should, and we have pushed the
    limit of that. We have cut and cut and cut the entitlements. We have cut
    the discretionary programs. We have cut the defense programs.
        And when this program came up in the Senate Finance Committee, a
    fair program that raises 75 percent of its money from the top 6 percent
    of the income-earners whose taxes were reduced in the 1980's, and has
    $250 billion in spending cuts, over 100 cuts of $100 million or more--
    let me ask you a question that you can take home to the classroom of
    your community: The other side who kept screaming to America, ``This is
    a tax-and-spend program, and the only problem is spending,'' had their
    chance to offer spending cuts in the Senate Finance Committee. How many
    spending cuts do you suppose they offered over and above the tough cuts
    that I had taken out of agriculture and veterans and every other
    program? Zero, that's how many. You couldn't find them when it got to be
    specific.
        Let me tell you, for every $10 of deficit reduction in this plan
    designed to get interest rates down and spur growth, $5 comes from
    spending cuts; $3.75 from the upper 6 percent of American earners, as I
    said, whose taxes were lowered in the 1980's; $1.25 comes from the great
    middle class with incomes of between $30,000 and $100,000. Families
    under $30,000 are held harmless, and for the first time in the history
    of this country, if this program passes, people who work 40 hours a week
    and have children in their homes will be lifted out of poverty. That's
    the best incentive to get off and stay off welfare I ever heard. That's
    what's in this plan, and those are the facts.
        I challenge you to embrace this issue with exuberance and joy and
    optimism. The only thing I question about the end of that beautiful film
    was when everybody said, ``We've got to stick with the President, and
    it's hard to change.'' It was almost like a burden to carry. This is
    like teaching a new class to your students. This is no big deal. America
    will change if somebody will tell the people the truth instead of giving
    them the same old pablum.
        In spite of all the cutbacks, this budget does invest more, in Head
    Start, in immunizations, in family preservation, in college loans, in
    national service tuition grants, in school-to-work transition, in
    defense conversion, to help all those people in the Bay area that are
    going to lose their jobs because of base closings, and in new
    technologies to create new jobs for the 21st century to take up for all
    the defense cuts. It sure does, but we still maintain a freeze on
    overall spending for 5 years because we've cut so much out of other
    things.
        Now, those are the facts. We need your help to get them out. But
    most importantly, we need America's help to put this country on the
    right track. This deficit is like a bone in our throat. It is keeping us
    from investing in our people, in our growth, and in our future. And you
    can help to take it out by explaining to the American people what the
    facts are. This is not about labels and slogans. This is not about tax
    and spend. It's not about borrow and spend, either, which is what we've
    been doing for the last 12 years.
        And it is not enough to reform our economic

    [[Page 1012]]

    system. We must reform our schools, our welfare system, our health
    system, and our political system. We have to be about that, too. And we
    are. We have to do something for all these people who have been hurt by
    the base closings and the defense contract cutbacks. Here in the Bay
    area, the people here took the hardest lick from this, the third round
    of our base closures. They and the people in South Carolina and the
    people in a part of New York were hardest hit. It is wrong for us not to
    do something for them. So we propose to spend over the next 4 years $5
    billion to speed up the environmental cleanup, to give preference to
    job-creating strategies around these base closings, to train people, to
    empower communities, to let people rebuild their lives in a new peace-
    oriented society where we still value the people who won the cold war.
    It is worth the money. We have to do that.
        Now, what has all that got to do with education, and what has all
    that got to do with what I'm about to do? That is what I want to say to
    you in the last portion of my remarks.
        I am leaving when I leave you to go to Tokyo to the G-7 summit. This
    will strengthen my hand, the progress we are making on the economic
    program. And every one of you, in lobbying your Members of Congress to
    support it, have helped that. Why will it strengthen my hand? Because
    for years American Presidents have gone to these meetings, and they have
    complained that other countries should open their markets to American
    goods, that other countries should trade with us more fairly. Do you
    know what the American Presidents have been told? ``Don't talk to us
    about that. Your deficit is so big it is distorting the global economy.
    It is mandating your big trade deficit. Your Government deficit is
    messing up the whole works. Don't tell us to change until you change.''
    Well, guess what? I'm going to be able to go for the first time in a
    decade and say, ``We are changing. Now you must change, too. Work with
    us. Let's put some jobs back into this global economy. We can create
    more jobs and have more economic growth if we can open everybody's
    markets and if we can coordinate our economic policies.'' And now we'll
    be able to say, ``You've been asking us to do this for 10 years. Here we
    are. Now help. Let's do it.''
        We cannot grow unless all the world grows. I will say again, Japan
    has its lowest rate of growth in decades. Europe has its lowest rate of
    growth in 20 years. Since 1987, over two-thirds of our new jobs have
    come from exports. Somebody has to be able to buy from us in order to
    create jobs that way. This is very important. And by helping us to pass
    the economic program, you have made a contribution to that.
        I also want to say to you very frankly that I am going to challenge
    the other countries to work with us in a new cooperative effort to
    tackle the most troubling problem of this new era, and that is the
    stubbornly high rates of unemployment, even in times of economic growth.
    Even in times of economic growth. There are European nations that have
    had big economic growth and have still not been able to get their
    unemployment rate down below 9 percent.
        We're supposed to have been out of the bottom of our recession 2
    years ago. And yes, we have nearly a million jobs in the first 5 months
    of this year, but we're still over 3 million behind where we ought to be
    based on historical trends. This is a global crisis. The wealthy
    countries, even when they become more productive, even when they grow,
    are having trouble creating new jobs. We need to know why. We need to
    ask new questions, and we need to find new answers. We have to do this.
    We owe it to you, to your families, and to the future of this country.
        Today I am announcing that I have asked my top economic and labor
    advisers to invite their counterparts from all these nations to come to
    the United States in the next few months to a meeting in which we search
    for the causes and possible answers for this stubbornly high
    unemployment. There are things each of us can do within our Nation, and
    we do it together, that will help us not just to grow the economy but to
    ensure that economic growth means more jobs for Americans and more jobs
    for the world. That is the way we have to do this, and this is a very
    important advance in the dialog going on among these countries. We've
    never really discussed this issue before, and we have to face it. I have
    called several of the other leaders of these other countries, and they
    are very enthusiastic because they're just as frustrated as I am that no
    matter what they seem to do for their economy, the jobs aren't coming
    along. And I will say again, if everybody in every one of your
    communities who wanted to work had a job, we wouldn't have half the
    problems we do today.

    [[Page 1013]]

        Finally, I want to emphasize in this area one other issue. I'm not
    just going to a meeting of the top industrialized nations, I'm taking my
    first foreign trip to Asia, to send a message that the Asian Pacific
    region has a very important role to play in your future. After the
    summit in Tokyo--thank you--[laughter]--I'm going to Korea as well. This
    region today is absolutely bursting with energy and growth. Already,
    over 40 percent of our trade is with the Asian Pacific region. Last year
    it exceeded $120 billion and accounted for almost 2\1/2\ million
    American jobs.
        Along with Europe and the Western Hemisphere, Asia is where we must
    find much of our growth in the next few years. In recent years, when we
    looked across the Pacific, we focused on our trade difficulties with
    Japan. Well, the trade deficit with Japan is real, unacceptable, and
    we're working very hard to take some steps with Japan to deal with that.
    But our relationships with the Pacific for the most part are good for
    us, and we will benefit from them.
        We must never forget how much we've already benefited from all the
    immigrants who have come to this Nation, many of them to this State,
    from all the nations of Asia. We can build on that for a brighter
    future.
        I want to lay out ways in which we can make our relationship with
    Japan, with Korea, and with these other nations stronger. I hope we will
    have a new global agreement on more open trade before the end of the
    year. I hope we can coordinate our efforts with these countries because
    when we do that, it really affects jobs in your community.
        These kinds of policies are important, but they're not sufficient,
    and that's where you come in. Our policies can open the door to new
    opportunities for the American people, but whether they can walk through
    the door depends on whether they are educated and trained for the new
    global economy. Without the knowledge, without the skills, without the
    temperament, without the drive to capitalize on opportunities, America
    will still not be what it ought to be.
        One hundred years ago our Nation's wealth was based on raw
    materials. Fifty years ago it was based on the huge capacity we had for
    mass production. Today it's based on what our people know and what they
    can learn. That's why the very best investment we can make is in the one
    resource that remains firmly rooted within our borders, the people who
    live in the United States of America.
        When I was a boy, education was touted, as it always has been, as
    America's great equalizer. It is still that. But today, it is America's
    great energizer as well, the best change agent we can possibly have. It
    binds us together, it draws our youngsters in, it moves them ahead, it
    builds their self-worth, it instills a sense of pride and civic
    responsibility. America's public schools have been the cornerstones of
    progress for over two centuries, from the little red schoolhouses, to
    land grant colleges, to hundreds of community colleges that gave the
    children of working parents a chance to make something of themselves. We
    have seen what education can do.
        Now there are school-to-work programs launched in cities and suburbs
    and rural districts around the country that are giving people the real
    chance to compete for a lifetime. And now I go into educational
    settings, and I see people in their twenties, their thirties, their
    forties, their fifties, their sixties, sometimes their seventies,
    learning anew for the challenges and opportunities they face.
        You know better than anyone else the immense challenges that you
    face in our schools because they have such ambitious goals and such
    difficult and challenging obstacles. No other nation, as I said before,
    tries to teach so many students from so many backgrounds and cultures
    and languages. You shoulder our country's hardest and most important
    work. That's why we need to make sure that you and your schools are
    ready for the 21st century. That's what the national education goals are
    all about, to ensure that every child enters school ready to learn, to
    get rid of drugs and violence and make our schools safe. Several weeks
    ago, our administration's ``Safe Schools Act'' was introduced into the
    House and the Senate. It is a good beginning. We cannot expect the
    students of this country to reach high achievement when their very
    safety or the safety of their teachers is in danger.
        In safe schools, we can make sure our students know what they need
    to know. We can make sure that our students lead the world in math and
    science achievement. We can make sure that we can compete in the global
    economy and live in the global village. As I head overseas, I'm reminded
    how much more we need to do. We need to give our students a thirst for
    exploration and a sense of widening horizons. As one college president
    puts it, we need to acquire

    [[Page 1014]]

    global literacy. Our students need to understand not only the meaning of
    democracy but the spirit of Japanese culture and the richness of African
    history. We need them to know more about foreign languages than just how
    to order in a restaurant. Foreign languages in this era aren't simply a
    sign of refinement, they are a survival tool for America in the global
    economy.
        And while I have said repeatedly all across this country, the magic
    of education is what occurs in the classroom and what the parents give
    if they do their job, it is still clear that your National Government
    has a role to play and must be your partner. Our job is to provide
    leadership, to set standards, to offer incentives that will help States
    and local school systems chart their own path to excellence with
    responsibility and accountability from all in the system. Most of all,
    we can do that if we are your partners. And I believe that the president
    of this organization would say we have had the partnership I promised in
    the campaign of 1992, and we will continue to have it through the work
    of Secretary Riley and Secretary Reich at the Labor Department and our
    entire Cabinet. We want the teachers of America to be the engines of
    reform. And we are convinced that they will be.
        Our education agenda is ambitious, and its heart is Goals 2000,
    which enshrines into law the national education goals and world-class
    standards. We must reach them by the turn of the century. The
    legislation we need to make it happen, enshrining Goals 2000, is
    awaiting action now in both Houses of Congress. It has bipartisan
    support, thanks in large measure to the Herculian efforts of the
    Secretary of Education.
        Goals 2000 will give parents and students and teachers a clear
    assessment of classroom performance. It will encourage schools to be
    more creative in organizing classrooms, training teachers, and
    motivating students. It will help students to prepare for work after
    graduation. It will provide funding to support the reform efforts that
    are blossoming all across America. It will mean that the investments we
    propose to make in Head Start and other early childhood programs, like
    immunization, will actually be able to bear fruits so that the gains
    from preschool will be able to be made permanent instead of being lost
    if we have the right sort of goals and the right sort of standards and
    the right sort of partnership and support. That is what we seek through
    Goals 2000.
        I intend to fight hard for this bill's passage. And I intend to
    fight hard against anything that will water it down, weaken it, or
    divert it from its essential mission: partnerships with people at the
    State and local level. We cannot run the schools of this country from
    Washington, DC. We need to empower you to run them.
        I also want to mention our school-to-work initiative. Today half of
    America's young people don't go on to college. We know from now the
    census data in the 1980's that every high school graduate who gets at
    least 2 years of post-high school education at least has a decent chance
    to get a good job with a growing income, and that every high school
    graduate with less than 2 years of post-high school education or every
    person who drops out of high school has an excellent chance of being
    unemployed or getting a job with a declining income. I think it is clear
    what our course should be. Every student ought to finish high school,
    every high school graduate ought to have at least 2 years of school-to-
    work transitional education and training so they can successfully learn
    for a lifetime. That has to be our objective. Our legislation forges a
    remarkable and heretofore unprecedented partnership between the
    Departments of Education and the Department of Labor and then working
    with people at the local level. We must do this.
        This is not a controversial issue. It may never blister across the
    headlines of America. But I'm telling you, if we want to raise the per
    capita income of Americans, we've got to make every worker literate,
    we've got to make everybody have the equivalent of a high school degree,
    and we've got to give people the chance to get at least 2 years of
    further training. That will raise incomes and increase jobs in the
    United States.
        Now, my fellow Americans, as I leave you and head off to Japan, I
    want to say again that there is a common challenge that spans your work
    and mine. For the challenge we face in the global economy is about more
    than interest rates and trade balances. And the challenge you face in
    your own classrooms is about more than discrete subjects and SAT test
    scores. The fundamental question of our time involves a matter of
    national character, the question of whether we will apply our heritage
    and values to the demands of a new and rigorous time. I am confident of
    the answer. I am concerned still that

    [[Page 1015]]

    so many of our people seem to lack the same confidence. I know life is
    tough for most Americans, as much because it is uncertain as because of
    the real difficulties of the moment. But both are real. Still there is
    no nation with more resilience, more creativity, more love for freedom
    and devotion to progress than the United States. So now it is time once
    again to show what we are made of.
        Yesterday in Philadelphia on the 217th anniversary of the United
    States, I had the astonishing experience of being an American President
    sitting in the middle of the President of South Africa and the president
    of the African National Congress, the President of a nation once known
    as the most vociferous symbol of apartheid in the world and the man who
    had been the symbol of the struggle against apartheid, having lingered
    for 27 years in jail as a political prisoner there together to receive
    in common a political medal from the founding city of the United States
    of America because they put their differences behind them, agreed on
    elections, agreed on a nonracial democracy. And by next year we will
    have that in South Africa. Now, that, that is a symbol. That is a symbol
    of what people can do when they suspend their cynicism and they suspend
    their bitterness and they overcome their difficulties and they act on
    their beliefs. And what has that got to do with us? Because what is
    bringing them together are democratic ideals forged in the American
    Constitution, a commitment to a bill of rights like the American Bill of
    Rights to protect the rights of minorities as well as majorities and to
    enable people who are different to live in peace and to pursue progress.
        If we can inspire that in that country, how can we not still be a
    nation of builders and believers here at home. You and I are joined in
    common cause, and I believe we will succeed. You in the classroom and me
    in my classroom. And so, now I go abroad grateful for your support,
    grateful for your commitment to our children, and more confident than
    ever that together we can do our jobs and make life for all Americans
    what it ought to be.
        God bless you, and God bless America.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:02 a.m. at the Moscone Center. In his
    remarks, he referred to Brad Sherman, chairman of the State Board of
    Equalization, and Keith Geiger, president, National Education
    Association.