1997 Ad

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 21, 1997

Thank you very much to our Teacher of the Year and all the teachers of the year and their friends and supporters and family members who are here. Senator Glenn, Congressman Chabot, Secretary Riley, and Vice President Gore, thank you for being such wonderful partners to me.

Dick Riley - next year, Dick Riley and I will have been working together for 20 years in one way or another, and we're about to get the hang of it. [Laughter] And I really think he's done a wonderful job as our Secretary of Education.

I want to tell you, this NetDay idea that the Vice President developed - we were just sitting around talking one day, and I was bemoaning the fact that he was doing some elaborate thing on his computer screen in his office and I still can hardly figure out how to turn mine on. [Laughter] And we were all laughing about how our children were leapfrogging us in their capacity to deal with computers and one thing led to another and before you know it, we have a goal that we'll hook up every library and classroom in the country by the year 2000, and then there's going to be a NetDay and, all of a sudden, one day we hook up 20 percent of the classrooms in California. And I never met anybody that was any better at taking an idea and turning it into reality than Al Gore. And this NetDay thing, it's going to revolutionize education in this country because we're not going to stop until we bring the benefits of technology to every single child in this country, and I think it's a wonderful thing.

I could have done without Secretary Riley telling that story that my - [laughter] - my second grade teacher did. But I was sitting here - I have no notes on this, so if I mess it up you'll have to forgive me, but the truth is that Sister Mary Amata McGee, whom I found after over 30 years of having no contact with her - she was my second and third grade teacher. I found her in Springfield, Missouri, one night when I came there near the end of the 1992 campaign. I had no idea what had become of her. I didn't know what had happened. So I reestablished my relationship with her. But she was a little too generous. The truth is, I think she gave me a D in conduct - [laughter] - and I think she gave me a D not because I raised my hand but because I spoke whether I was called on or not. [Laughter]

But if ever you wonder whether what you do matters, after Sister Mary Amata McGee in the second and third grade, there was Louise Vaughn, Mary Christianus, Kathleen Scher, my sixth grade teacher, who was my steady pen pal until she died just a few days before she became 90 years old, when I was Governor. And then in the seventh grade, my homeroom teacher was Ruth Atkins. And then there was Miss Teague, my civics teacher in the eighth grade. And Mary Broussard, my ninth grade English teacher, who was the only person in our class besides me that supported John Kennedy over Richard Nixon. [Laughter] In the ninth grade!

And I could go through my whole high school list of teachers, through my college list of teachers. All the people around here have to put up with stories that I forget that I've already told once about specific verbatim things I remember that my teachers in college said in lectures over 30 years ago.

Now, don't ever think what you do does not matter. I remember them all as if I were sitting with them yesterday. And there are things that each of them gave to me that I am not even aware of today after all these years of having had a chance to think about it.

Every one of you made a decision that you would never be wealthy. [Laughter] You made a decision that you would give yourselves to the next generation. You made a decision that you would do at work what we're all supposed to do in our families - that you would always be thinking about tomorrow.

On New Year's Eve, someone asked me, in this meeting I was at, if I had to write a legacy on my tombstone, what would it be? And I would say - I said something like - I don't remember exactly what I said, but something like that I had the privilege of leading America into a new century and keeping the American dream alive for everyone, having our very diverse country live together as one America, and maintaining our leadership as the world's greatest force for peace and freedom and prosperity. If you think about that, every single one of those tasks requires that we do a better job of educating more of our people, every single one.

You look around America today, we have 5.2 percent unemployment. It's a great thing. And it's also entirely misleading. Unemployment is virtually zero for people who have the skills necessary to meet the demands of the emerging economy if they live in a place where investment is coming in. What we have to do is to close the gaps and the skill levels. How do you do that? Give people better education and then provide incentives to invest in the places that have been left behind.

The Vice President was in Detroit a few days ago, promoting our empowerment zone concept of trying to build communities and give incentives for people to invest where people are there willing to work and there is no investment. But the unemployment rate is absolutely meaningless if you're unemployed. If you're unemployed, the unemployment rate is 100 percent. [Laughter] It's not one or zero or five or - you know, that's what it is. So we can't create opportunity for all Americans unless everybody first has the educational skills.