    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [January 9, 1998]
    [Pages 28-32]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to High School Teachers, Students, and Parents in Houston, Texas
    January 9, 1998

        Thank you. Let's give Ronald another hand.
    Didn't he do a great job? [Applause] Thank you very much. Let me say,
    first of all, thank you for the warm welcome; thank you for coming. I
    welcome all the students here from all the schools around the area, the
    college and the university presidents. And I understand we also have the
    student body presidents from the University of Houston, Texas Southern,
    Prairie View, and I believe the University of Texas at Austin. I welcome
    all of them here.
        I also want to say a special word of thanks to the AmeriCorps
    volunteers because I believe all of us should serve, and I believe we
    should

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    give more young people the chance to serve in their community and then
    help them go on to college if they do.
        I'd also like to thank Secretary Riley
    for his work and for being here with me today. And I want to say a
    special word of appreciation to your Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson
    Lee. She is a remarkable person. She has
    supported the efforts that I have done my best to make on your behalf to
    improve education and to improve economic opportunities, to reach out to
    the rest of the world and make America strong in the 21st century. She
    has done a remarkable job, and I'm honored to be in her district today.
        I'd also like to thank Congressman Lampson
    for coming. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to your new
    mayor, Lee Brown, and thank him publicly
    for his service in my Cabinet. We could nearly have a Cabinet meeting
    today, we almost have a quorum because our former Treasury Secretary,
    your former Senator, Lloyd Bentsen, and his
    wife, B.A., are here, clearly one of the most
    successful Treasury Secretaries in the entire history of the United
    States. You should be very proud of that.
        And lastly, of course, I want to thank your immediate former mayor,
    Bob Lanier, and his wonderful wife,
    Elyse, for their friendship to me and for their
    service to the city of Houston. I have told people all across the United
    States, I have never met a more gifted public servant than Bob Lanier.
        Before I get into my comment about education, let me try to put it
    into some larger context. I wanted to have all the young people here
    today because I wanted this to be a meeting about your future. I thank
    my friend Jennifer Holliday for coming
    here to sing and for that magnificent song she sang just before I came
    out. There really is a dream out there with your name on it, but you
    have to go get it. And I want you to see your dreams and your life
    against a larger landscape of America's dream and America's life.
        We already have one foot in the 21st century, and it's a time that
    will be very, very different from the immediate past. How will it be
    different? Well, you know and you see and you feel it here in Texas.
    First of all, there will be the phenomenon of globalization. People and
    products and ideas and information will move rapidly across national
    borders, both the borders that touch us like Texas and Mexico and the
    borders that are beyond the oceans that require us to fly or to
    communicate in cyberspace.
        Secondly, there is a phenomenal revolution in information and
    science and technology. Not only can children in Houston communicate
    with children in Australia on the Internet or go into libraries in
    Europe to do research, but the very mysteries of the human gene are
    being unraveled now in ways that offer breathtaking possibilities to
    preserve the quality and the length of human life, to fight back
    disease, and to bring people together at a higher level of humanity than
    we've ever known. That's all very encouraging.
        We also know that as the borders between people break down, we're
    more vulnerable to the problems of other people, and our neighbors are
    more than just the people that live next door to us. People all around
    the world are our neighbors now. We see a remarkable spread of malaria,
    for example, around the world, and a lot of people getting it in
    airports and bringing it to other countries as they travel between
    airports. We know that chemical and biological weapons can be made in
    small quantities and can do a lot of damage, and people can carry them
    around across national borders. So we know that not only with our
    possibilities but also with our problems, our challenges, we are more
    interdependent. And yet, we have to depend more on ourselves, as well.
    That's why education is so important.
        My goal for your country, when I'm gone from the Presidency and all
    you young people are living out your lives, is that you will live in a
    new century in which the American dream is alive and well for every
    single person who's responsible enough to work for it; in which your
    country is still the world's leading force for peace and freedom and
    prosperity, recognizing that we can't do it alone, that we have to do it
    as partners on good terms with as many people who share our values as
    possible; and finally, and key to the whole thing, that we will go
    forward as one America, across all the lines that divide us--the racial
    lines, the regional lines, the income lines, the lines of ethnicity and
    religion--every single separation.
        We'll say, okay, we've got a lot of differences in this country, and
    that makes us more interesting. It makes life more interesting. We
    respect those differences. We celebrate those differences. But there are
    fundamental values that

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    bind us together as America, that make us one country, stronger than
    ever in a new world.
        That's why I was profoundly honored when your former mayor, your present mayor, the
    Congresswoman, Phil Carroll, and so many others banded together to defeat
    Proposition A, and I was glad to actually come out and do my little part
    in that, not because I held all the answers to all the problems
    regarding all of our racial differences but because I know one thing: As
    your President, I have spent an enormous amount of time, the time you
    gave me to be President, trying to do what I could to save lives and
    stop people from killing each other over their racial, their ethnic, and
    their religious differences.
        I see people in nations in Africa engaging in tribal warfare, when
    they're all so poor it breaks my heart, and I think, if only they would
    join hands to try to lift their children up, how much better would they
    be. I see my people in Northern Ireland still arguing over what happened
    600 years ago between the Catholics and the Protestants, when the young
    people say, ``We worship the same God. It's about time we started acting
    like it. Let's build a better future together.'' I see people in
    Bosnia--Serbs, Croatians, Muslims, Western Christians, Orthodox
    Christians, and followers of Muhammad--who shared the same piece of land
    for hundreds of years and lived for decades in this century in peace,
    slaughtered each other for years, and now we're trying to get them back
    together. And they have to learn to lay down their hatreds.
        If we want to lead that kind of world away from that sort of thing,
    we have to set a good example. We have to prove that on every street
    corner in this country, in every school in this country, in every
    workplace in this country, in every apartment house in this country, we
    not only say we believe we are one America and none of us are any better
    than anybody else in the eyes of God, we have to live like it. We have
    to live like it.
        And finally, just in a few days, I'm going to see the Prime Minister
    of Israel and the head of the Palestinian
    Liberation Organization, Mr. Arafat, to try to
    end the longstanding differences in the Middle East. The beginning of
    the world's monotheistic religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity,
    all in that little piece of land--nearly everybody in America, not all
    of us but most of us, trace our faith's roots to that place. Isn't it
    unbelievable that people still are fighting over that, when if they
    would say, ``We are the children of one God. Why can't we be one people
    and share this land of milk and honey together?''
        So I say that one of the reasons I challenge people to engage in
    citizen service, one of the reasons I was so proud to be introduced by
    Ronald Cotton, is not just because he's a
    valedictorian, not just because he's going to be a doctor, not just
    because I might need him to fix my heart one day--[laughter]--but
    because as busy as he is, he still does his citizen service. That's what
    we all should do. If he's got time to do it, the rest of us should have
    time to do it.
        Now, what's all that got to do with education? You need to
    understand all this if you're going to make the most of the 21st
    century. It can be the brightest, best time in all of human history, but
    it will only work for America because this is a democracy, where we
    think everybody should have an opportunity. It will only work if
    everybody has a chance to walk across that bridge to the 21st century
    together, if we all have a chance.
        That's what's special about America. That's how we got started. We
    believe nobody ought to get an unfair advantage, everybody ought to have
    a chance, and if people need a hand up, we ought to give it to them.
    That's what we believe as Americans. Now, the problem is, in this world
    we're living in, where the pace of change and the scope of change is
    greater than ever before, where the world is crowding in on you as never
    before, there is nothing anybody else can do for you unless you're
    willing to make your own dream by the development of your own mind.
        Therefore, the 21st century will not only be known as the
    information age, the age of science and technology, it will also be
    known by ordinary people as the education age because what you know will
    depend--will determine in large measure the scope of your life in the
    new era. It's always been an advantage to have an education. But what I
    want you to understand now is it's not just an advantage; it is a
    necessity.
        Let me just give you a couple of statistics. Two decades ago,
    college graduates made about 40 percent more than people with a high
    school diploma. Today, in less than 20 years, the gap has gone to 75
    percent. Over a lifetime, people who have 2 years of college will make a
    quarter

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    of a million dollars more than high school graduates. Each additional
    year of college after high school means a 10 percent increase in yearly
    earnings for people. If you graduate from college, you're much, much,
    much more likely now to get a job with a pension, with health care, with
    other benefits, and where the income goes up, instead of staying the
    same or actually declining, as against inflation.
        We have learned as a people, therefore, that the more we invest in
    education and the higher the quality is, the faster our economy grows as
    a whole. In the last 2 years--one of the things I'm proudest of is not
    only that we're now over 14 million new jobs in the 5 years I've been
    privileged to be your President, with a 24-year low in unemployment, but
    in the last 2 years, more than half of the new jobs coming into this
    economy have paid above average wages. That's the good news. But the
    challenging news is, you can't get those jobs unless you have the
    requisite education.
        And let me say again, this is about more than money. This is not
    just about money; this is about our ability to be strong as a nation.
    You want America to lead the world? Do you really believe we can
    maintain the world's strongest defense, the world's strongest economy,
    the world's strongest diplomatic force unless we are the world's best
    educated people? There is no way. Do you want us to set an example for
    other people about how we should live and have good values? We also have
    to have smart enough minds and be sophisticated enough to figure out how
    to handle the honest differences that we have.
        We have honest differences. That's what makes life interesting. We
    wouldn't have to have elections if we didn't have any differences.
    [Laughter] We have honest differences, but we have to figure out, how do
    we handle our differences in ways that we grow stronger, we grow richer,
    we improve the quality of life, and we strengthen our values?
        It is not just about money. We will not succeed in the world of the
    21st century unless we dramatically improve the quality of education
    that all of our children get from kindergarten through high school, and
    unless we have larger numbers of people going on to college and
    succeeding, not only because you have to know more but because--well,
    look what's happening. Look at the Internet. How many of you young
    people have ever used the Internet? How many of you have ever logged on
    to the Internet? Look at all these hands up.
        Now, let me tell you something. Five years ago, when I became
    President--just 5 years ago--the Internet was still virtually the
    private property of research scientists. It started out as a little
    Government project so that research scientists could communicate with
    each other and share the latest data. And a young person in his twenties
    basically figured out that this thing could have great commercial
    applications, great educational potential. It was unbelievable. And all
    of a sudden, all these young people in their twenties were becoming
    multimillionaires, some of them worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
    figuring out how to use the Internet for education and for business
    purposes.
        Now, it's staggering. Hundreds of thousands of new homepages are
    added to the Internet every month. It's probably the fastest growing
    communications institution in all of human history. And just 5 years
    ago, nobody knew what it was. I say that to make this point. The reason
    you need a good education is not just so when you get out of college you
    know what you're supposed to know; you have to be able to learn for a
    lifetime, and then to apply what you know. So that education is much
    more dynamic than it used to be. Think of the Internet. That's a good
    model, more and more things coming on. It's hard to keep up. You've got
    to keep learning about it. That's the way all work is going to be.
        And that's why we're here. Now, we've worked hard to do what we
    could to improve our schools, to say: We ought to have high standards;
    we ought to push proven reforms; we ought to connect every classroom and
    library to the Internet by the year 2000; we ought to make sure that
    nobody gets out of the third grade without being able to read
    independently--that's what the America Reads program is all about; we
    ought to make sure that everybody that needs it is in a good Head Start
    program or other pre-school program; we ought to make sure that after
    school and on the weekends our young people have something to do and
    something to say yes to so they have good lives and don't get in
    trouble. Houston was a leading force in proving that works.
        But then after all that is said and done, we have got to get more
    people to go on to college. Now, I have done my best to fulfill a
    commitment I made to the American people when I

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    ran for President, which is that we would open the doors of college to
    everyone. Last year when we passed the balanced budget agreement, we
    agreed for the first time in 50 years to have a huge increase in help
    for people to go to college, the biggest increase since the GI bill when
    the soldiers came home from World War II, 50 years ago.
        Here's what it does, here's what you can look forward to, every one
    of you, now: For the first 2 years of college, a family can get a
    $1,500-a-year tax credit per person in the first 2 years of college.
    That makes community college virtually free to virtually all Americans.
    In the junior and senior year, for graduate school, you can get another
    $1,000 tax cut.
        If parents begin to save for their children's education in an
    education IRA, they can not only save the money, and it won't be subject
    to taxes when they save it, but then they can draw it out and what it
    earns, and it won't be subject to taxes either. I don't think we need to
    tax the money people save for a college education. It will enable
    ordinary people to save for a college education.
        We had the biggest expansion in Pell grant scholarships in 20 years
    for deserving students, kids who need that. We rewrote the student loan
    program so you can get the loans quicker, and you can pay them back
    easier. I don't know how many young people I used to meet when I was
    Governor that said, you know, ``I'm going to have to drop out of college
    because I'll never be able to afford to pay my loans back. I want to be
    a teacher. I want to be a police officer. I'm not going to make a lot of
    money. I can't pay my loans back.'' Now, under our direct loan program,
    you get to pay your loans back limited to a percentage of the money you
    earn when you get out of college, so it will never bankrupt you. We have
    opened the doors of college to all Americans.
        A hundred thousand young people now have been in the AmeriCorps
    program earning money to go to college and serving in their communities.
    And today I announced that in the budget I am going to send up to
    Congress next month, we will actually ask for funding for 1 million
    work-study students, for people who are trying to work their way through
    college. We have opened the doors of college for all Americans.
        That's opportunity, but opportunity never works without
    responsibility. So I want every young person here to remember this. We
    can open the door, but you have to walk through. And that means, first
    of all, you've got to finish high school, and you've got to make sure
    when you finish you know what you're supposed to know so the diploma you
    have means something. And then you have to keep your sights high.
    Remember, there is a dream out there with your name on it. And we're
    trying to open the door to the dream, but you've still got to walk
    through and seize it. You still have to walk across the bridge to your
    own future. You still have to build your own future.
        But what I believe with all my heart is that you will live in the
    most interesting, exciting, kaleidoscopically diverse time in human
    history if we are wise and good and we continue to be the nation that is
    the world's best hope for peace and freedom, the nation that reaches out
    to others in principled interdependence, a people that learn to live
    together as one America, a people of responsible citizenship who can
    seize the opportunities that are out there. That's the America we're
    trying to build for you. But in the end, you will determine whether
    that's the America that lives in the 21st century. You can do it, and I
    know you will.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:55 p.m. in the General Assembly Hall at
    the George Brown Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to
    Ronald Cotton, student, Robert E. DeBakey High School for Health
    Professionals; Philip J. Carroll, president and CEO, Shell Oil Co.;
    Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel; and Chairman Yasser Arafat
    of the Palestinian Authority. A portion of these remarks could not be
    verified because the tape was incomplete.