[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.