Remarks to teachers, parents, and students of high schools in Houston, Texas: January 9, 1998

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 19, 1998

Thank you. Let's give Ronald another hand. Didn't he do a great job? [Applause] Thank you very much. Let me say, first of all, thank you for the warm welcome; thank you for coming. I welcome all the students here from all the schools around the area, the college and university presidents. And I understand we also have the student body presidents from the University of Houston, Texas Southern, Prairie View, and I believe the University of Texas at Austin. I welcome all of them here.

I also want to say a special word of thanks to the AmeriCorps volunteers because I believe all of us should serve, and I believe we should give more young people the chance to serve in their community and then help them go on to college if they do.

I'd also like to thank Secretary Riley for his work and for being here with me today. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to your Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee. She is a remarkable person. She has supported the efforts that I have done my best to make on your behalf to improve education and to improve economic opportunities, to reach out to the rest of the world and make America strong in the 21st century. She has done a remarkable job, and I'm honored to be in her district today.

I'd also like to thank Congressman Lampson for coming. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to your new mayor, Lee Brown, and thank him publicly for his service in my Cabinet. We could nearly have a Cabinet meeting today, we almost have a quorum because our former Treasury Secretary, your former Senator, Lloyd Bentsen, and his wife, B.A., are here, clearly one of the most successful Treasury Secretaries in the entire history of the United States. You should be very proud of that.

And lastly, of course, I want to thank your immediate former mayor, Bob Lanier, and his wonderful wife, Elyse, for their friendship to me and for their service to the city of Houston. I have told people all across the United States, I have never met a more gifted public servant than Bob Lanier.

Before I get into my comments about education, let me try to put it into some larger context. I wanted to have all the young people here today because I wanted this to be a meeting about your future. I thank my friend, Jennifer Holiday, for coming here to sing and for that magnificent song she sang just before I came out. There really is a dream out there with your name on it, but you have to go get it. And I want you to see your dreams and your life against a larger landscape of America's dream and America's life. We already have one foot in the 21st century, and it's a time that will be very, very different from the immediate past. How will it be different? Well, you know and you see and you feel it here in Texas.

First of all, there will be the phenomenon of globalization. People and products and ideas and information will move rapidly across national borders, both the borders that touch us like Texas and Mexico and the borders that are beyond the oceans that require us to fly or to communicate in cyberspace.

Secondly, there is a phenomenal revolution in information and science and technology. Not only can children in Houston communicate with children in Australia on the Internet or go into libraries in Europe to do research, but the very mysteries of the human gene are being unraveled now in ways that offer breathtaking possibilities, to preserve the quality and the length of human life, to fight back disease, and to bring people together at a higher level of humanity than we've ever known. That's all very encouraging.

We also know that as the borders between people break down, we're more vulnerable to the problems of other people, and our neighbors are more than just the people that live next door to us; people all around the world are our neighbors now. We see a remarkable spread of malaria, for example, around the world, and a lot of people getting it in airports and bringing it to other countries as they travel between airports. We know that chemical and biological weapons can be made in small quantities and can do a lot of damage, and people can carry them around across national borders. So we know that not only with our possibilities but also with our problems, our challenges, we are more interdependent. And yet, we have to depend more on ourselves, as well. That's why education is so important.

My goal for your country when I'm gone from the Presidency and all you young people are living out your lives is that you will live in a new century in which the American dream is alive and well for every single person who's responsible enough to work for it; in which your country is still the world's leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity, recognizing that we can't do it alone, that we have to do it as partners on good terms with as many people who share our values as possible; and finally, and key to the whole thing, that we will go forward as one America, across all the lines that divide us - the racial lines, the regional lines, the income lines, the lines of ethnicity and religion - every single separation.