Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. We need
to set for them new and more rigorous goals. We must demand more of
ourselves and our children by raising literacy levels dramatically by the
year 2000. Our children should master the basic concepts of math and
science, and let's insist that students not leave high school until they
have studied and understood the basic documents of our national heritage.
There's one more thing we can't let up on: Let's redouble our personal
efforts to provide for every child a safe and drug-free learning
environment. If our crusade against drugs succeeds with our children, we
will defeat that scourge all over the country.
Finally, let's stop suppressing the spiritual core of our national being.
Our nation could not have been conceived without divine help. Why is it
that we can build a nation with our prayers, but we can't use a schoolroom
for voluntary prayer? The 100th Congress of the United States should be
remembered as the one that ended the expulsion of God from America's
classrooms.
The quest for excellence into the 21st century begins in the schoolroom but
must go next to the workplace. More than 20 million new jobs will be
created before the new century unfolds, and by then, our economy should be
able to provide a job for everyone who wants to work. We must also enable
our workers to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of the workplace. And I
will propose substantial, new Federal commitments keyed to retraining and
job mobility.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be sending the Congress a complete series of
these special messages--on budget reform, welfare reform, competitiveness,
including education, trade, worker training and assistance, agriculture,
and other subjects. The Congress can give us these tools, but to make these
tools work, it really comes down to just being our best. And that is the
core of American greatness. The responsibility of freedom presses us
towards higher knowledge and, I believe, moral and spiritual greatness.
Through lower taxes and smaller government, government has its ways of
freeing people's spirits. But only we, each of us, can let the spirit soar
against our own individual standards. Excellence is what makes freedom
ring. And isn't that what we do best?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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