Remarks to the National Education Association in San Francisco, California - Pres William J. Clinton - July 5, 1993 - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, July 12, 1993 by Bill Clinton

In a few hours I wi]l be traveling to Tokyo to attend the annual summit of the world's largest industrial nations. A foreign summit with all of its protocol, its interpreters, its communiques, seems awfully remote to most Americans' lives and probably seems remote to the work most of you do in our schools. But in fact, the work that I will be doing in the next few days and the work that you do every day are closely related, for we have entered an era where the line between our domestic policy and our foreign policy has completely evaporated.

Today I want to take a few moments to explain to you what this trip is about, how it relates to what you do, and the goals that we all share for our country. Like your work in the schools, this trip is about crafting our future. Its goals are our prosperity and security in a tough global economy.

Forty-five years ago at the end of the cold war, President Harry Truman and a generation of visionary leaders realized we had entered a new age that demanded new policies and new institutions. They built NATO to deter Soviet aggression. They created international financial institutions to help to rebuild Europe and Japan and promote global economic growth.

Now our generation after the cold war must create a new vision, new policies, and new agreements to enable the world's nations to prosper. We cannot long continue to promote democracy when Europe is having the slowest economic growth in 20 years, Japan facing the slowest economic growth in four decades, and America over 3 million jobs behind where we ought to be at this point in our development, still with the strongest economy of all these industrialized nations. We can do better, and we must. You think about every one of your schools with every financial problem you've got. If every American who wanted a job had one, and we were growing this economy, the money would be there to pay our teachers, to invest in our schools, to give our kids a better life.

A generation ago, our students prepared themselves for a worldng world dominated by large corporations and heavy manufacturing industries which competed with each other and the United States, but suffered no foreign competitors and could dominate the international markets they chose to enter. Today they enter a high-tech information revolution spearheaded by flexible entrepreneurial firms, both large and small, that are networked through computers with their suppliers and their customers all around the world. They enter a world where everybody's job, directly or indirectly, is affected by global competition. In this economy, money and management and technology are incredibly mobile, and a nation's well-being depends largely on the skills of its work force and the capacity of the people to adapt and be productive.

A generation ago, students planned for lifetime careers with one company. Today's graduates can expect to change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime, even if they stay with one company. Before they reach retirement, always in conjunction with other workers in the world, they will be in constant competition. And we must face the hard fact that many of the people with whom we compete for the high-wage, high-growth jobs are uniformly more thoroughly prepared to begin their work than our people are.