[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[June 23, 1993]
[Pages 923-925]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Presidential Scholars Awards Presentation Ceremony
June 23, 1993

    I want to thank you all for being here and welcome the Members of 
Congress who are here and those who were here who had to leave for a 
vote. I want to say a special word of--it's a good vote--[laughter]--I 
want to say a special word of thanks to the Marine Band for being here 
to play for us today. Thank you. Since my office is just over there, 
when they come out here to play for you, they also keep me in a far 
better frame of mind as I work through the day.
    I thank the Commission on Presidential Scholars for all the work 
that they have put into selecting this year's recipients. I especially 
want to thank my good friend Governor Florio of New Jersey for his work 
as Chairman. I asked him to serve as Chairman because I admire the 
courage and conviction with which he has conducted himself as Governor 
of New Jersey and particularly the bravery that he showed in dealing 
with the educational needs of the people of his State.
    The Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, formerly was Governor of 
South Carolina, and in that connection he labored mightily for years to 
improve the education of the children of his State and served as a 
mentor of mine. And I thank him for his leadership.
    As I look out at this group today of proud parents and family 
members and friends and educators, I'm reminded once again of the 
curious mix of things that produces the sort of achievement that we see 
embodied in the young people on this stage today. There are, 
unfortunately, still a lot of people in the United States who believe 
that how much you learn and how well you do in life depends primarily on 
your IQ. And yet we know that if you strung all the people on the globe 
together from first to last by IQ, you couldn't stick a straw between 
any of the two. A remarkable combination of ability and intangible 
things like encouragement and love and support as well as personal 
effort and drive and commitment go into making up really gifted learners 
who are committed to doing it for a lifetime.

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    All the young people who have been acknowledged today have great 
natural talents, and they should be grateful for what God has given 
them. But every person on this stage today, not only them but me, we're 
all here because of the people who helped us along the way.
    There's a young man who was supposed to be here today named Justin 
Konrad, from the State of Maine, who on June the 5th was in an 
automobile accident that claimed the life of one of his friends and 
claimed part of one of his legs. Today he's in a hospital in Maine 
recovering from his injuries. I talked to him this weekend when I was up 
in Maine, and he's already talking about going to Harvard and majoring 
in government and playing sports. When he gave his--let me see if I can 
pronounce this--salutatorian's address at his high school graduation, he 
gave a speech about optimism. And he still has it, and I hope all of you 
will be able to keep it as you go through college and you pursue your 
careers. Keeping a positive frame of mind may sound like an obvious and 
easy thing. It becomes increasingly difficult with a difficulty of 
circumstances, but more important with every passing day.
    Last Saturday, just before I spoke with Justin by phone, I was 
speaking at the commencement of Northeastern University in Boston, and I 
met another young student there graduating from college named Doug 
Luffborough. He was the person who was designated by his fellow students 
at Northeastern to speak on their behalf. Doug's mother is a cleaning 
woman who earns $7,000 a year and who, in addition to her regular job, 
cleans a private school part-time to pay tuition for another of her 
sons. For a while, the mother and all of her children were actually 
homeless.
    It's remarkable that this young man ever got to go to college at 
all. The advice he got from one of his counselors was to give it up and 
start looking for a job. But his mother believed in him and refused to 
let him aim low. When she couldn't get a babysitter, she took him along 
to work. And he watched her day-in and day-out never give up hope, and 
by her example he learned a powerful lesson. When he came to 
Northeastern University, the school made it possible for him to work 
part-time while going to school, and his on-the-job experience helped 
him to get a very good job when he graduated. He's shown an amazing 
amount of responsibility, but his mother stood by him, his school stood 
by him, and he had an employer who stood by him.
    So no matter how heroic individuals are, they still need help to 
make it, and support. Chances of success increase dramatically when 
other people believe in you, give you opportunities, and ask you to take 
the responsibility to make the most of them. And I want to thank every 
person here today who made it possible for these young people to be up 
on this stage and to have the kind of life they're going to have.
    I also want to say that this administration is working hard to open 
the doors of college education to all young people, to make it possible 
for them to get loans to go to college and to pay them back on much more 
favorable terms than has been the case in the past. And we are trying to 
pass, with strong bipartisan support, a national service program which 
will make it possible for tens of thousands of young people to earn 
credit against those loans before, during, or after their college years 
by giving something back to their communities where they live. Vice 
President Gore has just returned from California where he kicked off our 
Summer of Service program, which is the beginning of this national 
service effort.
    I know that a lot of you have been involved in service programs. I 
want to recognize one of the scholars, MarLeice Hyde, from Valley High 
School in Afton, Wyoming. Where are you? I want to tell you about her. 
She organized the junior volunteer program at her local hospital, which 
contributed over 1,000 hours of community service at the hospital, while 
holding two jobs, attending evening college courses, and meeting the 
responsibilities that come from being the oldest of six children. Let's 
give her a hand. [Applause] Congratulations.
    Finally, let me say a word about our educators. We often spend our 
time talking about what's wrong with our educational system, but we 
ought to also acknowledge that there is a great deal that is right with 
it. And a lot of these young people today might not be here were it not 
for their teachers, their principals, the people who worked with them 
and believed in them. We think that the educators of America who are 
trying to do a good job shouldn't have to go it alone and should have 
some way of knowing whether they're meeting the competition around the 
globe. That's why Secretary Riley has worked so hard with his Goals 2000 
program and with the legislation now moving

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through Congress to embrace world-class learning standards that all 
American schools will be given the opportunity to meet and that all 
American parents and students can judge their own progress by. I am very 
encouraged by that work and very grateful for the cooperative spirit 
that we see now in Washington between everybody involved in the 
educational endeavor. We think that Goals 2000 will turn a nation at 
risk into a nation on the move in education.
    Let me say in closing that I've thought a great deal about education 
this summer because I just celebrated under this same tent a couple of 
weeks ago my 25th college reunion. I saw some of my classmates: One of 
them runs a refugee center for Palestinians in Jordan; one came all the 
way back from Cambodia where he had his life at risk monitoring the 
elections in that troubled country where once so many people were killed 
by tyranny. Many of them have made incredibly valuable contributions to 
their lives. And all of us were sitting here 25 years later in this very 
spot remembering with incredible vividness actual specific things our 
teachers had said to us in class. We had a contest to remember how many 
verbatim sentences we could remember from different professors we had. 
And every one of us concluded at the end that none of our lives would 
have been possible if we hadn't had the benefit of a world-class 
education.
    I hope this Presidential scholarship brings to all of you on this 
stage those kinds of memories 25 years from now. I hope you will do 
everything you can to make the most of the opportunities before you. And 
I hope you will take some time along the way to enrich the communities 
from which you came and the people who made it possible for you to be 
here today.
    Thank you all. Congratulations, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 4:42 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House.