[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 6 (Monday, February 9, 1998)]
[Pages 208-209]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland

February 5, 1998

    The President. Thank you. Let's give the band a hand. Are they good 
or what? [Applause] Thank you. Thank you very much.
    First of all. I want to thank Elizabeth for her introduction, and 
Nikole for her introduction of Prime Minister Blair. Weren't you proud 
of your fellow students today? [Applause] They were great.
    Governor, Senator, Members of Congress, Nancy, all the faculty and 
administration staff here at Montgomery Blair High School, we are very 
glad to be here. I want to paraphrase something President Kennedy said 
when he and his wife went to Paris: I now will go down in history as the 
man who accompanied Tony Blair to Montgomery Blair High School.
    I want all of you to know that in years to come you will be very 
glad you were here for many reasons. But one of them is that Hillary and 
I are convinced, based on our friendship with Prime Minister Blair and 
his wonderful wife, Cherie, that they are going to make truly historic 
contributions to the world of the 21st century, and you are a part of 
that because you invited him here today, and I thank you for that.
    I want to just say a couple of things very briefly about this whole 
issue of education. You know that we just were in your computer room and 
we were E-mailing students in England. And I was thinking about how the 
first time I went to England, 30 years ago this year, I went on a ship 
and it took me 6 days. Now, people can look at me over a computer, and 
we can communicate in a matter of seconds.
    One of the biggest questions we have to face as a people, and one of 
the great questions they're facing in Great Britain, is whether or not 
this new technology-driven, information-driven, scientifically exploding 
world all of you will live in will work to the benefit of all of our 
people without regard to their racial, their ethnic, their religious 
background, their income, or will it just benefit even more people who 
are privileged by birth to have a high income and then can get a good 
education? I am committed to making sure that every single American 
child is a part of the 21st century revolution.
    And I just want to say that the first thing that I tried to do was 
to open the doors of college to everyone who would work for it. And I 
believe I can look at every one of you today and say, because of the 
HOPE scholarship, a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college, 
because of the lifetime learning credit, because of more Pell grants and 
more work study positions and more national service positions and better 
student loans with better repayment terms--if you will work for it, you 
can go to college in American today. You can do it, and that's 
important.
    And now what we have to do in our country----
    Audience member. We love you!
    The President. Thank you.

[[Page 209]]

    What we've got to do is to make sure that every American has access 
to the best elementary and secondary education in the world. And in 
order to do that, we have to do a lot of things. If you saw the State of 
the Union the other night, I talked about it. I want to lower class 
sizes in the first three grades to 18. I want to help build new 
classrooms or remodel them in 5,000 schools so we can deal with the 
problems of overcrowding. I want to help to lift standards in the 
poorest school districts in America. And I want to make sure we hook up 
every classroom and library in every school in America to the Internet 
by the year 2000.
    There are two things I want to say about this, and one of them you 
know I'm accurate about. The first thing is, it's one thing to say we 
can hook up the schools and the classrooms and another thing for the 
schools to be able to afford it. So the Federal Communications 
Commission--and we have some members here from the FCC--have given a $2 
billion education discount to the schools of America so all our schools 
can afford to be on the Internet by the year 2000.
    And the second thing I want to say is that a lot of school teachers 
are like the President; they're sort of technologically challenged. 
[Laughter] And there are a lot of classes in America where the kids know 
a whole lot more about the Internet than their teachers do, right?
    So now we can laugh about it and have a lot of fun, but if our 
objective is to make sure that every single child can tap the full 
potential of the information age, then every single teacher must be in a 
position to know all he or she needs to know. So we are also investing 
to make sure that from now on, every newly certified teacher will be 
trained to know at least as much, if not more, about those computers and 
the Internet and communications as the students in the classroom. That 
is important.
    I want to make this last point. Prime Minister Blair complimented 
you on your school spirit, and we loved it when you cheered when we came 
in, all of you, and we thank you. But look around this room, look 
around, look at each other. This is a picture of America in the 21st 
century. People from all backgrounds, all walks of life, all--
[applause]--and what you have to believe with all your heart and soul is 
that if you get an education, you can live out your dreams. And if all 
of you get an education, we can prove that America can accommodate all 
this diversity and grow stronger by the values we have in common; that 
we will only grow stronger and more prosperous and give more 
opportunities to more people to live out their dreams if we can give 
everybody a good education and then we prove that we can get along, 
across the lines that divide us, as one America. That's the America I 
want you to help me build for the new century.
    Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:50 p.m. in the gymnasium. In his remarks, 
he referred to Elizabeth O'Brien, student, and Nikole Sara Bender, vice 
president, student government, Montgomery Blair High School; Gov. Parris 
N. Glendening of Maryland; Senator Barbara A. Mikulski; and Nancy King, 
president, Montgomery County board of education. The transcript made 
available by the Office of the Press Secretary also included the remarks 
of Prime Minister Blair.