[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[February 2, 1996]
[Pages 129-136]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Concord, New Hampshire
February 2, 1996

    Thank you very much, Mayor Veroneau, Superintendent Sokness, to my 
host principal today, Mr. Cogswell, thank you. We had a wonderful time 
at your wonderful school. I want to thank the two people who spoke just 
before me. It's great to be back in Concord, great to be back in New 
Hampshire, great to be reminded of what makes our country work.
    Cullin Wible, I thought, gave a good talk today for a person of any 
age, but a remarkable talk for a high school junior. We ought to give 
him another hand. [Applause] It was good. But his service in helping the 
other students to fully access the learning that can come with being 
able to use technology is even more important than how well he spoke. 
And that is symbolic of what we need more of in America, people helping 
each other to bring out the best in themselves.
    I also want to say that I am truly amazed and genuinely admiring of 
the remarkable work that Stephen Rothenberg has done with his students, 
in bringing the computers into the classroom and getting private 
businesses here to help to give more equipment to young people who 
otherwise never would have been able to afford to have any high 
technology equipment, especially things they could take home; in letting 
people work together to put out that remarkable newspaper and taking it 
to the community, even beyond the school; and in realizing that every 
child has a contribution to make and a gift to develop. You know, if we 
had every teacher in America that committed, that innovative, that 
creative, and every community providing the kind of support I've seen 
today, our country could cut its social problems in half in a matter of 
a few years. I thank you, Stephen Rothenberg; you did a great job.
    I am delighted to be back here. I want to thank all of you for 
coming out, from Merrimack Valley, from Pembroke, from Hopkinton, and of 
course from Concord. Four years ago, I visited Concord High School, 4 
years ago this month. I had a horrible cold. I could hardly speak. I'm 
glad to be in somewhat better voice today. I'm glad to see all the 
people from the Second Start program again. [Applause] Thank you.
    You know, every 4 years this State performs a very valuable function 
for the rest of the country. In the New Hampshire primary system you 
have the opportunity, face-to-face in small groups and community 
meetings and real settings, at work and in school, to hold people who 
would seek the Nation's highest office accountable to the citizens who 
are ultimately in control of our destiny. You can ask about issues, and 
you can teach people who come from different lives and different 
experiences what it's like to see the entire American experience.
    In your tradition of town meetings and quiet conversations and 
genuine dialog, you rebuke the loud slogans and the harsh conflicts and 
so much of modern political life which sheds more heat than light. I 
know that, 4 years ago, I think the most valuable experience for me in 
New Hampshire was not just surviving and going on to be nominated and 
win but what I learned about America from the people of New Hampshire, 
including a lot of the students

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of New Hampshire who told me what their families' lives were like in 
those difficult days.
    I'm thrilled to be here at this Capital Center for the Arts. I know 
that Bob Hope and George Burns have been here, and I can't promise to be 
as funny as they were. [Laughter] But I can tell you, once I found out 
that they had been here, I wanted to come, because if they have been 
here, this is obviously a good place to extend your career. [Laughter]
    I also want to say a word to you of support for this incredible 
project, this beautiful, beautiful facility, this breathtaking ceiling 
that I just learned before I came out took 3,000 hours of volunteer 
labor. When this theater was condemned in 1989, you could have shrugged 
your shoulders and gone about your business; if you had done that, we 
would be holding this meeting in a parking lot today. But community 
leaders did not do that. Individuals, large companies, small businesses, 
the government, everybody decided they would work together to turn this 
challenge into an opportunity, and this grand theater is the result.
    To all of the members of the board of directors and all those who 
worked together to save this wonderful landmark from the wrecking ball, 
let me say, congratulations, job well done. Thank you for giving America 
an example of citizenship at its best.
    Now, I want to say today, I obviously came to talk to you about 
education and our challenges in education. But I want to make a larger 
point to begin. If you think about what Steve and Cullin and the Walker 
Elementary School and all the businesses that put ads in the newspapers 
and all the people who supported putting that project together and then 
putting the community into the information superhighway this week 
through the schools, what they have in common with all the people that 
worked to restore the theater, it is clearly one thing: It is a strong 
sense of community and a willingness to work as a team in ways that help 
individuals to develop their own abilities but make life better for 
everybody. That, it seems to me, is the fundamental lesson of America, 
and that is the fundamental thing we have to reassert today.
    If you think about what works in a society, it's not all that 
different from what works in any kind of contest: You've got to get all 
your players on the field; you have to make sure they're well prepared; 
you have to reward them when they succeed; there have to be rules that 
people follow; you have to trust the other people to follow the rules; 
and you have to work as a team.
    And that is what I think the great issue is in America today. There 
is no question of whether the Government can solve all of our problems; 
no one thinks that. No one ever really thought that, but no one 
seriously asserts that. But neither can we say to our people, this new 
global marketplace is so wonderful we're just going to leave all of you 
to fend for yourselves; good luck; call home once a year and see you 
later.
    What works in all human endeavor is this kind of teamwork, what we 
celebrated at the Walker School today and what we enjoy having the 
privilege to sit in this place today. And the questions we should be 
asking on the edge of the 21st century are: What are the great 
challenges we face? How can we help all Americans to live up to the 
fullest of their God-given abilities? How can we come together instead 
of being driven apart, because we know when we work together we all do 
better? How can we continue to make the world a safer and freer place so 
that our children and our children's children will be able to reach out 
in this global community in a way that enhances their own lives and 
lifts those of human beings all across the globe?
    Those are the kinds of questions that I tried to ask and answer here 
4 years ago, the kinds of questions I had the privilege of dealing with 
again in my fourth State of the Union Address just last week. As I said 
to Congress, and as the speakers before me illustrated, we are living in 
an age of enormous possibility. We have moved from, essentially, an 
industrial society to one that is dominated by information and 
technology. We have moved from a world that was organized around two 
great powers in the cold war into a world where virtually everybody in 
the world, with a couple of exceptions, have rejected communism. 
Everybody understands that free people ought to have free economic 
choices and be able to compete, and we are moving into a global village. 
And all these changes in the way we work and live have opened up 
possibilities for people that would never have been imaginable just a 
few years ago.
    Now, that is the good news. And it is a wonderful thing. You can see 
it manifest in a lot of ways right now. Do you know our country,

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for example, has produced more self-made millionaires--not people who 
inherited money, not people who were born with money, people who made it 
on their own--in each of the last 3 years than in any previous years in 
the history of America? Why? Because the world is opening up and people 
who are in the right place and have the right skills and have a little 
courage and a little energy may really have unparalleled opportunities. 
And that's exciting.
    But as the families of New Hampshire or any other State also know, 
that anytime you have this kind of big change you not only have great 
opportunities, you also have challenges. Four years ago when I came 
here, the challenge was people were literally out of work, didn't know 
when they would get jobs again. Banks weren't making loans to small 
businesses. Businesses weren't being started. Businesses were failing at 
a greater rate than they were starting.
    Now a lot of that has been overcome, and I'll say more about that in 
a minute. But still, because of the changes in this economy a huge 
number of American families are working harder and harder just to keep 
up, longer hours without a pay raise, feeling greater uncertainty about 
whether they'll keep their jobs or their health care for their families 
or have a pension when they retire or will be able to afford to send 
their children to college.
    So you may think this doesn't make sense. How could things be so 
good and people be worried? The truth is, it makes perfect sense. When 
you upset an established pattern and you open all kinds of new 
possibilities, the people that aren't very well-fitted at the moment for 
those possibilities are likely to get pushed down. It happened 100 years 
ago when people moved off the farm into the cities and on the factories. 
A hundred years ago we became an industrial society. We had all kinds of 
people doing very well and other people virtually starving in tenement 
houses in our cities.
    Anytime you have a period of big change this happens. You young 
people should be happy. You're going to live in an age of greater 
possibility than the world has ever known. And if our generation does 
its job right, you won't have to worry about anybody blowing the world 
up, you won't have to worry about people going to war for foolish 
reasons, you won't have to worry about a lot of things that have 
dominated the last 100 years. That is wonderful.
    But if we're going to keep the American dream alive for everybody, 
we've all got to think, well, now that all these changes are going on, 
how can we plug everybody into it? That's why I wanted to go to that 
classroom at Walker School today. I know every one of those children I 
visited did not come from a wealthy home. I know not all those children 
have computers in their own homes. I know this teacher and this student 
had to work hard to bring the benefits of the technological revolution 
to all children. That's why I wanted to be there, because that is what 
we have to do as a country. That is the fundamental challenge before us.
    You can look at New Hampshire. Four years ago when I was here, the 
unemployment rate was over 7 percent; today, it's almost down to 3 
percent. Four years ago when I was here, businesses were closing faster 
than they were opening; today, new businesses are increasing by 8 
percent a year. That's a very healthy rate. For 3 years now we've had 
more new businesses formed each year than ever before in American 
history. That's a good thing. So what we have to do is to take this 
energy that's out there that we've got going in our economy now, figure 
out how to spread those opportunities to everyone. It's one of our 
great, great challenges.
    If you look at how the world is, 4 years ago when I was here, we 
were worried about a lot of problems in the world. But now we see from 
the Middle East to Northern Ireland, to Haiti, to Bosnia, the United 
States has been a force for peace and freedom and dignity. Perhaps more 
important to the people who live right here, for the first time in the 
last 2\1/2\ years, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, 
there is not a single nuclear missile pointed at an American city, an 
American family, an American child. That is not being done anymore. 
That's a good thing.
    Maybe most important of all, we really do seem to be trying to come 
together to find more teamwork, more common ground around shared values 
and to move away from destructive conduct. We've had now for 2 years in 
a row the crime rate, the welfare rolls, the food stamp rolls, the 
poverty rate, and the teen pregnancy rate and the divorce rate going 
down in America--2 years in a row. That's a good thing. That's a good 
thing.
    How does all this happen? It happens when people start to work 
together. Now, you have to decide, all of you, how you want to move

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into the future and what you think the challenges are. And I came here 
to say to you that I believe that my role as President is to work not 
only through the Government but just through the Presidency, through 
direct appeals to the American people in all walks of life, to try to 
bring us together to solve these problems in the best way.
    I said in the State of the Union, I'll say again: The era of big 
Government is over. Big, centralized bureaucracies are going to move 
more and more and more into the past. That is a part of the new 
technological changes we face. Technology alone permits that.
    But you need to be sort of skeptical when people tell you that 
that's the real big problem. The Government of the United States today 
is the same size it was in 1965. When I came here in '92, I said we 
would reduce it by 100,000 and put 100,000 police on the street. We did 
that, except we've reduced the size of the Government by 200,000, and 
probably nobody has noticed. Why? Because of technology, because of the 
increasing productivity of the Federal workers who are doing a better 
job, because we did a humane job of helping those who leave to start new 
lives in other productive ways, we didn't just put them out on the 
street.
    But the point is, big bureaucracies are not going to be a part of 
the future of what you think of as the Federal Government. But we still 
have a responsibility to try to give you a Government that costs less 
but still does better and that helps you to do your job in the 
appropriate way, that helps people to work together, that helps people 
to make the most of their own lives.
    In the State of the Union Address, I said that we had seven great 
challenges, and I'd like to talk just a moment about them, and I'm going 
to take education out of order, because I'm going to wait until the last 
for that.
    Our first and most important challenge as a people, if we move to 
the future, is to do a better job of helping all of our children get off 
to a good start and strengthening our families. If we had strong 
families in every community in this country, and kids--every child--had 
a start out of the blocks that was good and adequate, we wouldn't have 
half the problems we have. You all know that. There are things the 
Government can do, but most of those things have to be done by people 
working together and by changes of the heart.
    The second thing we have to do is to try to help every American 
achieve economic security. As I said, we've got almost 8 million more 
jobs in the last 3\1/2\ years. Unemployment is down, but an awful lot of 
Americans are still working harder and harder just to keep up. How are 
we going to change that? How are we going to change that? Well, first of 
all, people ought to have access to an affordable pension they can keep 
when they change jobs. They ought to have access to affordable health 
care they can keep when they change jobs.
    Your parents, all of you students here, if they lose jobs or they 
have to change jobs, they ought to have access to lifetime education. 
Education is no longer the province of childhood. The average age of a 
college student at a 4-year college today is 26. The average age at a 2-
year community college is much higher. We have to view education as the 
effort of a lifetime, and it has to be seen not with fear by people my 
age but with hope. It has to be seen as the instrument of growing and 
going into the future. And it has to be available to people whenever 
they hit a rough patch in life's road.
    We have to, in other words, define a new way of people being secure 
when the economy is changing as much as it's changing and most of the 
jobs are being created by small businesses. And we've got to do that.
    The third thing we have to do is to keep on with our efforts to take 
the streets of America back from the forces of crime and drugs and gangs 
that have made them too unsafe in so many places in America. The crime 
rate is coming down, but it is still too high in most places, and we've 
got to keep working on that.
    The fourth thing we have to do is to leave our environment safer and 
cleaner than we found it and while we grow the economy. I say that in 
this beautiful State where people love the woods and the rivers and all 
of nature's bounties. There are still people who do not believe you can 
grow the economy unless you chew up the environment.
    But I don't know if you saw it--one of our major news magazines had 
a huge cover story not just a couple of weeks ago after we had these 
bitter winter storms, saying that ironically these bitter winter storms 
were due to global warming, not to global cooling, because the pattern 
of global warming is leading us to increasing extremes of temperature. 
We're getting more rain in many parts of the world, but it's

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coming in shorter and shorter spurts and floods, instead of regularly 
over time. We had a 500-square-mile block of ice break off from 
Antarctica; it began to float into the ocean. If this continues, slowly 
it will raise the water levels and mess up the whole environmental 
balance of the Earth.
    Now, you may think that's an esoteric issue. It's going to affect 
these young people, their lives. The strength of American agriculture, 
for example, will be affected by whether or not we can find a way not to 
destroy the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, not to have too much 
global warming; in addition to which we have to be concerned about the 
quality of drinking water, the quality of the water in which we swim and 
fish, the quality of the air, all the basic things. This is a huge deal. 
And this is a great economic opportunity for America if we understand 
that there are opportunities through technology and through innovation 
to preserve the environment, it will create more jobs than it will cost. 
But we have to make that decision.
    As I said earlier, we have a challenge to keep downsizing the 
Government, but not to give our country a weak Government but to give 
our country a small Government, a less bureaucratic Government, and one 
that focuses on helping the people who need help through no fault of 
their own, empowering people to make the most of their own lives, and 
being good partners to put together the kind of teams that solve the 
problems and seize the opportunities we discuss here today.
    I'll just give you one example. The Small Business Administration, 
since I've been President, has cut the budget by 40 percent and doubled 
the loan volume to create more small business. That's the kind of thing 
you should be able to get out of your Government.
    Finally, let me say that I know, because we have so many things 
going on here in our country and families and communities have so many 
challenges, it is tempting to say, ``Well, we don't have to worry about 
the Russians anymore, and we're taking down our nuclear arsenals as 
quick as we can. So why don't we just forget about the rest of the 
world?'' We can't do that. We can't do that. The drugs that come into 
this country come from other countries. If we want those other countries 
to cooperate with us in stopping the drugs--and literally a lot of those 
people we are asking every day to put their lives on the line--we have 
to work with them to help them solve our problems together.
    The terrorists that are sweeping across the world, many of those who 
have acted in this country come from other countries. If we want other 
countries to risk their lives to get those terrorists and send them here 
so I can make sure that they're tried, and if they're convicted to go to 
jail or punished in a proper way, we have to work with those countries.
    If you want America to be able to sell, we--now our exports in 
America are at an all-time high. And for the first time in many years, 
we are growing our exports faster than our imports are growing. If you 
want that, we have to be involved with other countries. So that's a big 
part of our challenge.
    But let me say, overarching all of that is the challenge we have for 
all of you. For the world in which we are living and the one toward 
which we are going, being dominated by information and technology means 
that all of us have to know things, all of us have to have high levels 
of literacy, all of us have to be able to reason, all of us have to 
learn things about basic math. But even more important, all of us have 
to be able to keep learning things, learning and learning and learning 
for a lifetime. And therefore, the challenge to America to give every 
single citizen the educational opportunities they need in some ways is 
the linchpin of our whole future because of the age toward which we're 
going.
    If you look at the industrial age, the one we just came out of, 
there are a whole lot of people just a little older than me and even 
people in my generation--I realize to you that sounds like a lifetime 
away, you can't imagine being 50 years old, but you will be someday--who 
were able to get very, very, very good jobs on a high school education, 
or maybe they just had a 10th grade education or 11th grade education. 
But they went to a city; they went to work in a factory; they got a good 
job; they thought it would be there forever. They thought they would be 
able to send their kids to college, have a nice home, take a vacation 
every summer, always have their health insurance covered, and they would 
retire with a good retirement along with their Social Security. And it 
didn't matter if they didn't have a good education.
    Today, more and more of our jobs, particularly those that pay well 
and have some amount of stability, are knowledge-based jobs. And

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therefore, we have got to do everything we can to up our educational 
opportunities.
    Now, in America, most education is handled at the local level, from 
preschool and kindergarten through high school. Most colleges and 
universities, almost 100 percent of them, are public at the State level 
or private. What is the National Government's role? Well, we have some 
things that we should be doing.
    We, for example, send funds to New Hampshire every day to help 
schools deal with the problems of children who come from very poor homes 
and may need some extra resources or school districts that themselves 
have a property base that's not adequate so they don't have enough money 
to deal with the schools, with all the kids that come in there, and they 
need a little extra help. That's important.
    We're doing what we can now at the national level to get people in 
the telecommunications industry all over America to do what Concord just 
did. Our goal, I will say again--our goal is to make sure that every 
classroom and every library in the United States of America and every 
school is on the information superhighway by the year 2000, every single 
one. You have to do that.
    Beyond that there are things that schools have to do for themselves. 
We ought to have the highest standards of excellence. And we ought to 
measure whether we're meeting those standards. And we ought to be 
willing to change if we're not. And I think every State should be 
willing to give teachers and parents more flexibility in how they work 
with the education system to make sure those things are done. I also 
believe that every school, beginning in elementary school, should teach 
good citizenship, good character, and good values. I think that is not 
inconsistent with saying those things should be done in the homes and in 
our religious institutions. There are certain essential characteristics 
that it takes to make up a good American citizen, and I think they 
should be communicated to our children and done at an early time.
    Finally, let me say that we need--we know now we need more than ever 
before to give 100 percent of the people who get out of high school the 
opportunity to go on to college and that money should never be an 
obstacle. You know, all the young people here probably know this, but 
every 10 years our country does a census, and we not only count how many 
people are living in the United States and break them down by gender, by 
race, by State, by neighborhood, we also do a lot of other things. We 
break them down by income and educational level, and we try to find as 
much as we can out, and then we can look at this census and look at the 
one before and see how America is changing.
    And I want every young person in the audience to listen to this, 
because it's very important: In the 1990 census, last time we counted 
everybody, we found that there was a huge break in income in the 1990 
census compared with the 1980 census, that came among people who had at 
least 2 years of education after high school. People who had at least 2 
years of education and training after high school tended to get jobs 
where they made a decent living starting out and then they had a chance 
slowly to get raises. People who didn't tended to get jobs where they 
didn't get a raise or even suffered declines in income, especially 
compared with inflation, and where they had less stability. And this 
really hit younger people.
    So whether you like it or not, if you're a young American, you need 
to be thinking about what you're going to do after high school to get 
enough skills, to get enough knowledge, to develop the capacity to learn 
for a lifetime so that if you go into the work force you can succeed in 
this exciting but very challenging new world.
    In the last 3 years we have done a number of things to try to make 
it easier for people to go to college. We redid the student loan program 
so that you can borrow money on better terms and pay it back on better 
terms. And no young person should ever refuse to get a loan to go to 
college for fear of not being able to pay it back, because now you can 
always pay it back as a percentage of your income so the payments will 
never break you. And that's a very good thing to do.
    I might add, we also were able to cut the student loan default rate 
nearly in half. So this does not mean that we should be weak and not 
make people pay their loans back, but you just shouldn't ask people to 
do something they can't do. We should always encourage people to do it.
    We've increased the number of scholarships and, of course, with a 
lot of support in States like New Hampshire where I thank both the 
Republicans and the Democrats who have sup-


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ported our national service program in New Hampshire, we've got 25,000 
young Americans out there working in their communities to solve the 
problems of their communities and earning money to go to college.
    In the State of the Union, I challenged Congress to go further, to 
make more college opportunities available, to help one million young 
Americans work their way through college with work-study funds, to give 
a $1,000 merit scholarship to every single high school graduate in 
America in the top 5 percent of every high school class in the country, 
and to give every family a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year to 
defray the costs of tuition at colleges and universities.
    If we can do these things, if we can hook all our schools up, all 
our classrooms, all our libraries to the information superhighway, and 
you have enough computers and good software and well-trained teachers 
and a supportive community, if we can have schools that hold themselves 
to high standards and measure whether they're meeting them, if we can 
make available college education to all Americans, these are the kinds 
of things that will make a profound difference in the future of our 
country. And we will do it together or not at all.
    You know--again, let me end with where I started. Going to the 
Walker Elementary School and watching those students put together that 
Walker Talker newspaper and then watching them put it into the Internet 
so people could pull it back, having their own Web page where people 
could actually say, ``What is in there that I want to read,'' it showed 
again, knowing that there were people in the community that gave 
equipment so that students without regard to their income could have 
access to technology in their homes, it proves not only that technology 
unlocks doors in ways we couldn't have dreamed of 4 years ago, it proves 
that the modern world will have to be solved by old-fashioned common 
sense and old-fashioned American hard work and cooperation.
    Walker Elementary School--I guess you know this, but I learned this 
morning, so I rewrote this so I could say this--that school stands on 
ground that is literally sacred to America's democracy. In 1778, the 
people of New Hampshire gathered there with their elected 
representatives and voted to ratify the Constitution. And New Hampshire 
was the last State to vote--not the last, but the ninth State, so the 
necessary ninth State we needed for enough States that made the 
Constitution real in the lives of the American people. And I think 
that's wonderful.

    Well, it's a long way from 1788 to today. And the church where they 
met is gone; the school is there. But you think about it: In that spot 
where over 200 years ago our Constitution moved into history as the most 
important document for freedom ever, in any country, among any people, 
on that very spot a student now can log on to the Internet and read the 
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all the records from 
those revolutionary days.

    These revolutionary ideas that we now take for granted still count 
for something. We have to promise ourselves that in every place like 
Walker School across America revolutionary new ideas will never be a 
stranger, and that we can incorporate them all, we can take the best of 
them all if we are able to stay fast and true with our old-fashioned 
American values and way of doing things.

    I believe this country can face every single challenge that it has. 
We can have better education and stronger families. We can have a 
cleaner environment and safer streets. We can have access to health care 
for all Americans. We can do all these things if we work together.

    If you think about what we are here celebrating today, if you think 
about what these two fine gentlemen behind me represent, they represent 
the way America has met every challenge in the entire history of our 
country. And all we have to decide is that that's what we're going to 
do. I say again, the young people in this audience will live in the age 
of greatest possibility in human history. The young people in this 
audience will be able to do things that people their age a generation 
before could never have even imagined. But it's like everything in life; 
it is not free.

    And this new age, with all of its benefits, carries significant new 
challenges. We have to meet the challenges if we want the benefits. We 
can only do it if we do it together. Based on what I saw today, that's 
exactly what I believe is going to happen in America.

    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:25 p.m. in the Capital Center for the 
Arts. In his remarks, he

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referred to Mayor William Veroneau of Concord; Curt Sokness, 
superintendent of schools; Clint Cogswell, principal, and Stephen 
Rothenberg, sixth grade teacher, Walker Elementary School; and Cullin 
Wible, Concord High School student.