Remarks at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 4, 1996

Number four, we ought to work hard to make our schools, all our schools, places of values and learning, not violence. We have supported zero tolerance for guns in schools. We have encouraged schools to adopt school uniform policies. We have helped communities to enforce truancy laws and curfews. We fought hard to protect the safe and drug-free schools program from slashing cuts, because all of our children, early in life, need to see one of those D.A.R.E. officers or other role models up in their classrooms saying, "These drugs can kill you. They're not just illegal. They're wrong. They can kill you." We need to do that, and we should support it.

I have also challenged all of our schools to a broad national goal: Every child in America should be able to read independently by the third grade. Forty percent of our children still cannot do that. I want to send 30,000 reading specialists and national service corps, AmeriCorps volunteers around the country to form an army of one million people to make sure that by the year 2000 all of our third graders can read independently.

In the budget I signed last month, we increased the number of work-study jobs for college students by a third, by 200,000 - that many more work-study slots. Now, I want to ask you something. I have recommended that at least 100,000 of those new work-study slots be allocated to young people who are willing to work to teach children to read. Would you help do that? Will you support that goal? Will you help us? [Applause] Think what it would mean for America if every 8-year-old in this country could hold up a book and say, "I can read this all by myself." We can do that.

The next thing we have to do is to hook up every classroom and library in America to the Internet by the year 2000. You know, 4 years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own Web page. [Laughter] I'm amazed at that. I meet kids all the time - been talking to my cat on the Internet. [Laughter] It's an amazing thing. By the time a child born today is old enough to read, there will be 100 million people on the Internet. We must connect all of our classrooms and libraries to that information superhighway by the year 2000. Here in Ohio and 18 other States this past weekend, a NetDay was held in which business people, computer technicians, students, parents, teachers all worked to hook up their schools.

Now, let me tell you what this means. I have asked the Federal Communications Commission to authorize an E-rate, a rate that would say, all the schools and libraries in America will be able to hook up to the Internet for free. We've committed - actually, the Internet is even getting overload now, so we've committed another $100 million to creating a new, expanded, upgraded, next-generation Internet to handle all of you who want to get on it.

Now, if you're not a computer wizard, like me, let me explain in plain language what it means. If we can hook up all of our classrooms to the information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web, what it means is, in those school districts Ted Strickland was talking about in southern Ohio, in the poorest inner-city school districts in America, in the most remote school districts in the far reaches of the high plains in America, for the first time ever they and the schools in all the richest districts and the middle class districts, for the first time ever, will have access to the same information in the same way at the same time. It will revolutionize educational opportunity in America, and we owe it to our children to do just that. And I hope you will support it.