Remarks at Mayer Sulzberger Middle School in Philadelphia - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 22, 2000

I was the first person in my family ever to go to college. I had a grandmother who got a correspondent's degree in nursing, lived in a little old place with about 50 people until she was old enough to move to the biggest city around, which had 6,000 people in it. But from the time I was a kid, for whatever reason, my mother and my grandmother and my step-father, who didn't have a high school diploma, they told me I was going to college. From the time I was 8 or 9, I believed them. They said it, and I just decided I was.

We've done everything we could to remove the financial bafflers. We've done everything we could to give your schools support, to identify problems and turn them around and increase the quality of education. But the children have to live in an environment where excellence is expected and people know it will be rewarded. So the idea behind GEAR UP is, get children when they're young and stay with them until they actually go to college.

Every one of you who's been a part of it, I thank you. I thank the leaders from the schools, the universities, the businesses, the community organizations for mentoring our young people, for taking them around college campuses, for letting people see colleges and imagine it. I never went on a college campus when I was 9 or 10 years old, I think, until my music took me there. One of the things I learned from the time I was your age is, if you want to do something big with your life, first you have to imagine that you can do it. You have to know how to put a picture in your mind of what you want to be.

So Toya says, "I want to be a teacher." How does she know she wants to be a teacher? Because she's seen people teaching and doing good things and lighting fires of excitement in children's minds. And so she can imagine what a wonderful thing it would be to be a good teacher.

The Bible says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." I wish it were written in positive terms: Where there is vision, the people flourish. I want you to be able to imagine your dreams. And that's another big part of this program.

I want to thank all the educators for getting the young people excited about academic achievement and helping to improve their study skills and strengthening the curriculum and getting kids to take courses like algebra they might otherwise just as soon not take, but it will help you go to college. And take the hard courses. Challenge yourself. Your mind is just like any other muscle in your body. If you want it to work better, you've got to work at it. Don't be afraid.

Do you know that over 90 percent of the people--really about 99 percent of the people--are capable of learning 100 percent of what they need to know to do nearly anything. Most of us never use more than a modest percentage of our brain power. You should be brave. You can do it.

I believe that intelligence is equally distributed in the world, but opportunity isn't. What we're trying to do is to make opportunity as equally distributed as intelligence is. But effort is not equally distributed either.