[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 25 (Monday, June 24, 1996)]
[Pages 1082-1086]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Presidential Scholars Awards Presentation Ceremony

June 20, 1996

    Thank you very much, Rebekah. You did a terrific job. I hope you 
weren't nervous; you couldn't tell. [Laughter] And I know your parents 
are here, and your teachers are very proud of you and all the other 
Presidential scholars who are here. I want to thank Stuart Moldaw and 
all the members of the commission who have the difficult job of picking 
Presidential scholars. I want to thank Secretary Riley for the wonderful 
work he has done as our Secretary of Education, for our many years of 
personal friendship.
    Rebekah did such a good job, we forgive you for your shameless South 
Carolina pride in mentioning the South Carolina scholars. [Laughter] You 
have given me leave to mention that there are two Presidential scholars 
here from Arkansas: Martin Beally from Sherwood, and Caroline Rothert, 
are from my hometown of Hot Springs. So I congratulate them. I also want 
to thank Alison Tupay for singing ``The Star Spangled Banner'' on the 
spot. She did a great job, I think.
    More than anything else--I'm going to see the scholars tomorrow when 
we send the Olympic torch off, but I love this moment. And I was jealous 
that the Vice President got to go to the medal ceremony yesterday. This 
has been sort of a crazy week around here. I was hoping maybe one of the 
scholars could explain the chaos theory to me, and I could apply it to 
what I'm trying to do. [Laughter] But I love this program. I believe in 
it so strongly. And I wanted to have a chance just to meet with not only 
the scholars but to see the parents and the family members, the 
teachers, the mentors, the people who helped these young people come to 
this point. And the most important message I have I'll just say and get 
out of the way; I wanted to say congratulations to the scholars, but I 
mostly wanted to come here to thank the families and the teachers who 
have made these young people's lives possible and better. If every 
American would follow the example you have set, this country would not 
have many problems and we would have an unlimited future. And I thank 
you so much for what you've done.
    To the young people, I would say this is an historic hall we are 
meeting in, Constitution Hall. When I was not much older than you--
you'll be embarrassed that I can remember this date so long ago--on June 
24, 1967, I had the highest seat up there--I couldn't afford a better 
one--to hear Ray Charles sing in Constitution Hall. [Laughter] He was so 
magnificent, I was so excited, I literally carried--the reason I 
remember the date is I carried the ticket stub in my billfold for 15 
years afterward. [Laughter] And I never forgot the concert.
    Not all that long before then, the great American singer, Marian 
Anderson, was denied the right to sing in Constitution Hall because of 
her race. And the father of my Deputy Chief of Staff, Harold Ickes, then 
the Secretary of the Interior, arranged for her to sing on the steps of 
the Lincoln Memorial, the same place that not so many years later Martin 
Luther King would deliver his famous address.
    So this whole area in here is full of America's history. And it 
reminds us--I hope all of you really get a chance to look around and 
sort of soak it in. It reminds us of all this country has done and 
meant. It reminds us of how far we have come. It reminds us of the 
continuing struggle we have to live up to the ideals of our 
Constitution. It also will remind you, if you look closely, that there 
are still hard-working people struggling to make ends meet within a mile 
of where we're now sitting or, in the case of the young people, 
standing. There are young people within a mile of this place who have 
not had the same opportunities that the young people we honor here today 
have had. So it is the story of America.
    We celebrate our achievements, we declare our loyalty to the 
Constitution and the values it embodies, and we must rededicate 
ourselves to making sure that the American dream never dies for every 
person who's willing to work for it. Every person here, as I said, is 
indebted--the young people who have been honored, to the teachers who 
have helped them, the parents who supported them, to others who helped 
along the way.

[[Page 1083]]

And I believe it is the job of every generation to make sure that the 
next generation has a chance to live out their dreams. That really is 
the mission of our administration.
    I came to Washington at a time of profound change for this country. 
We were moving from an industrial age into an age dominated by 
information and technology. The great computer genius, Bill Gates, says 
that the digital chip is the most significant advance in communications 
in 500 years, since Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Europe.
    We know that we have left the cold war behind, and we're moving into 
a global society in which we see ideas and information and money and 
technology and people move around the world in unimaginable speed and 
variation, compared to just a few years ago. We know that the young 
people standing on this stage--many of them will actually do work that 
has not even been invented yet. Within 10 or 15 years, some of them will 
be doing things that no one has even imagined yet.
    So we are moving into a period really unlike any in the history of 
our country before, when there will be more opportunity for people to 
live out their dreams than ever before. And the real challenge, I 
believe, is to make sure that every person has a chance, not a guarantee 
but a chance, to live out those dreams, that we do it in a way that 
brings us together as a country, instead of dividing us.
    We are, today, more a nation of immigrants that at any time since 
the beginning of this century that we're about to leave. Just look 
around this room. Look at them. We see the kaleidoscope of America. And 
it is a constant, urgent task that we find ways to unite this country 
around our basic values and not let ourselves be divided.
    Just yesterday I had Governor Riley's successor as the Governor of 
South Carolina and a number of other Governors here and other officials 
to talk about this recent wave of church burnings that has swept the 
country in the last year and a half. That is the exact opposite of what 
this country has always stood for. And it is an example of what is 
happening in much worse form around the world, where people are tempted 
to give into their old demons and define themselves by what they're not 
rather than what they are and what they can become. And we cannot afford 
that in this country.
    We must all be intolerant of that. We cannot be divided by religion 
or race, and we can never, never, never believe that in America it is 
permissible to take action against someone in their place of worship. It 
is wrong, and we must stand against it.
    I appreciate what Rebekah said about the commitment of this 
administration to education. I know that one reason it's so strong is 
that I wouldn't be here without mine. I lived with my grandparents until 
I was 4. They started teaching me to read when I was 2 or 3. I still own 
one of the little readers they started me on. It was printed in 1946, I 
think. I grew up--my grandparents, my grandfather just barely got out of 
grade school. My stepfather, who raised me, dropped out right before he 
got his high school diploma. I was the first person in my direct line to 
graduate from college.
    And if it hadn't been for my education and the gifts that others 
gave me along the way to help me with it, I never would have become 
President or had the opportunity to serve my country in the way that I 
have. I now know that there is something fundamentally different about 
the role of education in this time than in any other time. Always 
throughout our history, education has given individuals more 
opportunity. When we made a commitment to mass education after World War 
II, including making college education available to veterans who served 
through the GI bill, it helped to build an enormous middle class and to 
lift this country up, all of us.
    Now, we're in a third stage where education can either be the 
faultline dividing our country or the bridge by which we all walk into 
the 21st century. Because now it is not enough, as it was 50 years ago 
in the GI bill or even 30 years ago, to have a huge number of people 
with a college education creating economic opportunities for everybody 
else in a mass-production, industrial society.
    For at least 15 years, and actually probably more, our country has 
become more stratified, more unequal, divided more than anything else by 
the level of education of adults in the work force, so that you have 
this para- 

[[Page 1084]]

doxical situation where in the last 3\1/2\ years--when we've been able 
to cut the deficit in half and take our exports to an all-time high, 
create opportunities for 3.7 million new people to have their own homes, 
and see our country produce nearly 10 million new jobs--9.7 million new 
jobs--we know in spite of all, that about half of the American work 
force has not gotten a raise after you adjust for inflation and that, 
compared to 15 years ago, the people in the bottom half are basically 
working a longer work week, having less time to spend with their 
children, and not really keeping up with inflation.
    There are exceptions to all these statements, but the general rule 
still holds. The fundamental problem is that in a global economy, where 
we're all competing with everybody else, everywhere else, including 
people who work and live in some counties where incomes that no one 
could live a month on in America, that we have to raise the skill levels 
of our people so that education has to become more democratic, small 
``d'' democratic, more widely available and more advanced than ever 
before. It must.
    And that is what has driven the work that Secretary Riley and I and 
others have done in this administration, to try to lift the quality and 
standards of education but also to make it more broadly available. There 
are some things that we can do here. And we have tried to do them. We 
have tried to make available funds for States to come up with their own 
plans to meet the national education goals, to have high standards and 
high expectations, and to get free from some outdated rules and 
regulations. The Secretary's cut the rules of the Department of 
Education by nearly 50 percent. We have put more poor children into Head 
Start.
    Now, perhaps most important of all, over the long run, we've tried 
to expand the availability of college. In the last 12 years before I 
came here, college education was the only thing that increased in cost 
more rapidly than health care. And a lot of people are--a man who was 
laughing I assume has just educated two or three kids already in 
college. And he's laughing to keep from crying, probably. [Laughter]
    This is a problem with serious implications for our country. If you 
look at the 1990 census--and pretty soon we'll be doing another in 2000 
that will affect the lives these young people will have--you see an 
utterly stunning fact, that for the first time since we have been really 
working on the census, you can see clearly in a profile of America after 
the census in 1990, that American workers, particularly younger American 
workers that have at least 2 years of education after high school tend 
to get jobs where they are pretty secure in their jobs. If they lose 
their job, they're pretty good about getting another one. And they tend 
to get jobs that have a decent income with pretty good prospects for 
growth. Those that have less than that tend to be stuck in jobs where 
they can't change jobs very easily, and they usually lose ground to 
inflation. And the younger you are, the more profound those trends are 
likely to be.
    Now, that means that we have to do some things to open college to 
more people. We've tried to expand the Pell grant program, for example. 
We changed the college loan program. And I want to thank Secretary Riley 
for something that I believe 10, 20 years from now will be viewed as one 
of the most revolutionary changes we've made: We started making loans 
directly to the colleges so that the students could get them with less 
hassle, pay them back at lower cost, and then pay them back according to 
a whole range of options, including their ability to repay the loan. So 
that if, for example, if you take a job as a schoolteacher or a police 
officer or a nurse and you're not getting rich, and you have a big 
college loan burden, you still will be able to always pay those loans 
off because they can be limited to a percentage of your income. And it's 
changed a lot for people. It's made things more available.
    By next year, we'll have 65,000 young people who will have helped to 
pay their way through college through the AmeriCorps program, earning 
money to go to college by doing community service. And I see one of our 
board members is from the State of New Hampshire, a State that has one 
of the most active AmeriCorps programs in the country, where they really 
are doing remarkable things to solve problems and pay their way through.
    Now, we've got two other big initiatives here on the plate that I 
think are quite im- 

[[Page 1085]]

portant, and I just want to mention them because I want to encourage all 
of you to support these things and to embrace them. The first is, we're 
determined to see that every classroom and library in America hooked up 
to the Internet by the year 2000, every single one. And I think it will 
make a real difference.
    We started this effort in California, where we had a lot of private-
sector support. And we wired about 20 percent of the schools in one day, 
and they're already up to 50 percent of the schools now in California. 
Now, in many other States this whole movement is taking off and working 
like wildfire. But we also need to make sure that, in addition to being 
hooked-up, we've got good software, available hardware for all the 
students and sometimes for the parents as well, to participate, and 
trained teachers that are being given the support they need.
    There is now an alliance of educational groups, teachers, parents, 
and administrators that have joined together to make sure that we have 
enough teachers to keep up with the connections. They call themselves 
the 21st century teachers, and this fall they're going to mobilize a 
voluntary effort, 100,000 teachers to help 500,000 other teachers master 
the technology so that they can make the most of it for our young 
people. This has enormous potential to make educational gains more 
widely available in poor rural areas, in underserved urban areas, in 
places where finances have been a real problem. We can use technology in 
a way that will lift the quality of education and the availability of it 
if we do it right.
    The other thing I think we have to do is to make our goal a national 
goal, that college will be accessible to all Americans and that the norm 
will be that everybody would at least do 2 years after high school. That 
should become the rule. That should become what we all accept. We now 
have both economic and social evidence that we need to do that. So, in 
addition to the college loan and in addition to expanding the Head Start 
program, I have asked the Congress to made the first $10,000 of college 
tuition tax deductible to every family in the country for both young 
people and adults.
    I have asked Congress to broaden eligibility for families to invest 
in IRA's and then let people withdraw from their IRA tax-free if it 
becomes necessary to help finance their children's education or their 
own re-education as the case may be. And a few weeks ago at Princeton I 
asked--and by the way, I figured out a way to pay for all this in our 
balanced budget. This will not increase the deficit. I asked the 
Congress, in effect, to make access to 2 years of college universal by 
giving families a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of community 
college. The average tuition in this country at community college is 
$1,200 a year. So that would, in effect, make 2 years of community 
college available to every American family, because we would have a tax 
credit that you could actually see. In effect, the Government was 
helping to fund tuition, free for everybody the first year, given to 
everybody the second year that has at least a B average. I think after 
the second year you ought to ask people to make the most of their 
education if the taxpayers are going to fund it.
    But it seems to me that these are the kinds of things we ought to do 
in Washington if we want America to grow together. And when I look at 
these young people behind me and I think of every young person in this 
country, that we need to make sure that we reach them when they're young 
and we keep them in school and we give them something to hope for, this 
is a way of our being able to say to the poorest kids in this country, 
``If you hang on you can at least do this. This is something we will 
give you if you hang on.''
    Now, the rest of it is obviously up to the rest of you and your 
counterparts all across America. But I really believe that if we can 
both raise the quality and the range and reach of education, we can make 
sure that we grow together as a country instead of being split apart. I 
cannot tell you how important this is.
    One of our counties, the biggest county in this country, Los Angeles 
County, has already, today, children in it from 150 different racial and 
ethnic groups, in one county. And still this county is thriving, it's 
doing well.
    I'm just about to leave for a meeting of European leaders, and all 
over the world

[[Page 1086]]

they'll ask me, ``How did you have 9.7 million new jobs in America in 
the last 3 years?'' You know how many--the largest 7 economies in the 
world have created a total of 10 million jobs in the last 3\1/2\ years, 
9.7 in the United States. And that's something you can be proud of.
    But if you want this country to grow together, if you want these 
children to have the kind of future when their children are this age, to 
see America leading the world for peace and freedom, then we have got to 
recognize that education for everybody, more of it and better, is the 
central most important thing we can do to make sure that we go into the 
21st century able to meet our challenges and protect our values.
    And all of you, because of this experience, all these Presidential 
scholars because they're now Presidential scholars, and all of you who 
helped them along the way because you're their family members or you're 
their teacher, you can have a unique amount of influence in your 
communities to make sure that we all rededicate our efforts not to leave 
any child behind, not to leave any stone unturned in opening all the 
opportunity we can. There is no stopping this country in the 21st 
century if we do that one thing, if we give everybody who will work for 
it the chance to live out their dreams. If that is our shared 
commitment, our best days are still ahead. And 20 years from now they 
will be celebrating a whole new generation of Presidential scholars in a 
nation that is stronger and better and closer to the ideal of America 
than we are today.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 2:05 p.m. at Constitution Hall. In his 
remarks, he referred to Rebekah P. Close, Presidential scholar who 
introduced the President; Stuart Moldaw, Chairman, Presidential Scholars 
Commission; Gov. David M. Beasley of South Carolina; and Bill Gates, 
founder, Microsoft, Inc.