Remarks in Westland, Michigan

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 23, 1996

Now, I don't want to hesitate for a minute on this. I'm not declaring victory against crime, I'm just saying we're moving in the right direction. And what we need to do is not to abandon the present course but to bear down and do more of it, more police on the street, more criminals and guns and drugs off the street. We can do that if you will stay the course.

We've got to keep this economy growing and strong. That means we have to balance the budget, all right, because that keeps interest rates down. That means lower car payments. That means lower home mortgage payments. That means lower credit card payments. That means businesses can borrow money at lower rates to hire more people and raise wages and improve productivity. That's important. But we have to do it in the right way. We don't have to wreck Medicare or Medicaid or turn our backs on education or the environment.

We need to invest more money in research and technology to create those high-wage jobs for the future, not less. And we need an aggressive trade policy that opens new markets.

One of the proudest moments I've had as President of the United States was going to an automobile showroom in Tokyo and sitting in a car made in the United States of America for sale.

But let me say again, my friends, we cannot build that bridge with any of those components unless the foundation is world-class education. We've already done a lot to lower the costs of college loans, create the AmeriCorps program, which has allowed 50,000 young people to go to college and serve in their communities, raising standards, supporting improved Head Start programs and other things, but there is more we have to do.

Forty percent of the children in this country can still not read on their own when they are in the third grade. I want to mobilize an army of mentors and reading teachers to work with our schools and our teachers and our parents to make sure that by the year 2000 every 8-year-old can look at a book and say, "I can read it all by myself."

I want to make sure that every classroom in this country in every school not only has computers and teachers trained to help the students use them but is actually hooked up to the information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web.

For those of you like me who don't know a lot about computers, that may not mean much, so let me put it in plain language. Let me tell you what that means. If we hook up every classroom in America to the information superhighway, what it means is this: that in the poorest inner-city classrooms, in the most remote rural classrooms and all the classrooms in between, for the first time in the history of our country, all of our schoolchildren will have access to the same learning at the same level of quality, in the same way, in the same time as the students in the richest schools in America. That is achievable, and we must do it.

I want to make sure that we make at least 2 years of education after high school, in a vocational center, a community college in a college - at least 2 years after high school - just as universal in 4 years as a high school diploma is today. And we can do that by giving the American people a $1,500 tax credit for the typical cost of community college education, a dollar for dollar reduction for the cost of the tuition, and we ought to do it.