Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Lena Clemente
As I was preparing my comments for this afternoon's meeting with you,
I went back and rummaged through some old files of speeches
that I'd given in previous years.
I found dozens, given to scores of groups
over the course of my years with "Fortune" and Junior Achievement.
During my eight years as publisher of "Fortune,"
we made education reform a major editoral emphasis.
We felt it was vitally important for the business community
to understand the consequences of a failing education system.
To that end, we ran regular editorial features.
We devoted two entire special issues
to the plight of America's kids and the saving our schools.
We founded the Fortune Education Summit,
an annual gathering that brought
business leaders and educators together with political leaders
to try to define the role that business could play in education reform.
I traveled the land, speaking to business groups of all sizes,
reinforcing the importance of the issue,
and all the while, urging them to get involved as part of the solution.
Those eight years were followed by six more as CEO of Junior Achievement,
where the work continued.
This time with a slightly more focused, vested interest,
but all the while, still aimed at solving a major problem in our nation.
So I found some interesting reading as I rummaged through my old speech files.
One in particular caught my eye:
a speech I gave to a large group of prominent CEOs.
I started the speech that day with a quote from an essay that I'd recently read.
I'd like to read it to you today.
"We Americans are unhappy; we're not happy about America.
We are nervous, or gloomy, or apathetic.
As we look at the rest of the world, we're confused.
We don't know what to do.
As we look towards our future,
our own future and the future of other nations,
we are filled with foreboding.
We have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epic.
And nowhere in the world have man's failures been so little excusable
as in the United States of America.
Nowhere has the contrast been so great between the reasonable hopes of our age
and the actual facts of failure and frustration."
End of that quote.
That's tough stuff, dramatic thoughts, powerful words;
the words that certainly reflect the mood of many Americans today.
Amazingly, that essay was written before most of us were born.
Henry Luce, arguably, the most influential journalist of the last 100 years
was the author.
Entitled, "The American Century,"
it appeared in the February-1941 issue of "Life" magazine.
It was written
during one of the most desperate and frightening times in modern history,
that brief period
between the end of The Great Depression and the start of World War II.
Well, nowadays, we hear lots of talks
about the parallels between our time and the 1930s.
Just as Black Friday, back in 1929, signaled the end of an era,
the great recession of 2008 has dramatically impacted life
in these United States.
We hear endless conversations about global competition,
and all that we do with our industries and also with our education systems.
Global competition is the yardstick by which our nation is now being measured.
That's something that we Americans are not accustomed to.
We've usually measured ourselves by the family across the street,
the kids in the neighboring school, or the company in the next town.
Now we look at families in London and Rome
who seem to have a better quality of life than we do.
We look at young students from Asian nations
who run rings around our kids when it comes to science and math.
We look at all those TVs and DVDs
that come pouring out of Asia and into our living rooms,
and we try to understand why we don't even have
a consumer electronics industry in our country anymore.
We look beyond at the scores of other industries
that have left our shores;
and with them, went millions and millions of manufacturing jobs,
jobs that made up the backbone of our once robust middle class.
It was that middle class that drove our economy for generations.
But it's not just the sluggish job market
that has dampened our zest for the future.
We seem to have hit point in our history
where we're finding it difficult, if not impossible,
to solve problems of magnitude
that impact us all of us personally, and individually, as well as collectively,
the future of America.
Let me mention just a few of those other issues
that have crowded our national agenda for years,
and where we still see no solution in sight:
an aging infrastructure, healthcare, wars that puzzle our citizenry
drain our capital, and our treasured human resources;
after decades as the world's greatest creditor,
the United States has now become the world's greatest debtor nation;
our ever-growing insatiable appetite for foreign oil,
and perhaps, the most troubling
of all these seemingly impossible-to-solve problems -
K-12 public education.
We've known about these and other destructive issues
for years, and in some cases, for decades.
They grow in severity, they grow in intensity,
but we just kick the can further down the street.
This is particularly difficult
for a nation once renowned for yankee ingenuity.
Then when you hear
that mean spirited tone of our political debate today,
solutions seem very, very far way,
so a sense of futility creeps in.
The seemingly unsolvable problem that has always troubled me the most
is K-12 public education.
I see it as a giant first step
towards resolving some of the other issues that trouble us.
For decades, we, Americans, provided
a generally high quality primary and secondary education
for generations of our children.
Now we find that our society has allowed that great accomplishment to corrode
to the point that, when business people, or political leaders, or even educators,
talk about our education systems, they speak with a sense of urgency.
They use words like "breakdown," and "failure," and "crisis."
Many of us have been brought up short in recent years,
as we discover that large numbers of our young people are far less prepared
than they need to be to carry on the work and the spirit of this nation.
Without high standards in our education system,
we can forget about high standards in our economic system.
Kids have to be taught until they get the message.
The jobs out there are more complex than ever.
We live in a technological world that demands skills to keep it working.
No skills, no jobs, or damn few of them.
No jobs: and there is desperation, boredom, and drugs, and crime,
and the quality of life goes down for everyone.
Well, how in the world did we ever get ourselves into this mess?
Let there be no misunderstanding:
we are in a full-fledged, 24-karat, unsustainable mess.
There's plenty of blame to go around,
and plenty of directions to point accusing fingers.
Let me suggest one source of our problems.
Shortly before he died in 1995,
Scotty Reston, the famed New York Times columnist
was asked what events he considered to be the most extraordinary
in all his long life.
Mind you, this man had covered world wars, revolutions, the Civil Rights Movement,
depressions, presidents, kings, and emperors.
He listed, first and foremost, the transformation of America
from Puritanism to hedonism in just one generation.
He noted that in the short span of about 30 years,
America seemed to have turned its back on the ideals and standards
that had shaped this nation from the days of the pilgrims,
and in place of those values,
had embraced a do-your-own-thing philosophy.
We had, he felt, become a very self-centered society.
The ancient Greeks had an interesting word -
the word is "idios"; it means private; one's own private affairs.
And from it, it comes our word, "idiot."
(Laughter)
Indeed, the idiocy of focusing exclusively on one's own private affairs means
that the golden circle of success is ever-shrinking, never expanding.
When I was a much younger man, embarking on a career,
I found my inspiration in the lives of the older generations,
senior people who had seen so much, who had accomplished so much,
who passed that knowledge on to those of us well behind them
in terms of age and experience.
Now that I'm one of the senior folk, I find my inspiration in young people,
young people who are tackling monstrous challenges
with creativity, energy, and success,
young people not satisfied with the status quo,
young people working unselfishly to create a better society in the US.
Young people are responsible for more progress in education
than scores of their seniors,
including every president of the United States since 1980.
One of my favorite examples of this is "Teach for America."
You all know the story:
Wendy Kopp invented this initiative as an undergraduate at Princeton.
Her group of young people have now changed the trajectories
of tens of thousands of young lives in America.
They have given hope and futures where none had previously existed.
Their work, and the work of other similar organizations have demonstrated
that neither poverty nor race predetermine a young person's future.
A good education, inspired by a great teacher in the classroom,
opens limitless doors, and places control of those lives where it belongs:
in their very own, personal hands.
Young people leading the way.
Consider what young people accomplished in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Young people lead us into the technology era.
Youngsters then, with names like Gates, and Jobs, and Dell, create
a remarkable contribution to society
that had alluded the giants of corporate America.
More recently, Mark Zuckerberg.
These young people are changing society.
They are leading the way and doing impossible things.
It reminds me of the advice that the White Queen gave Alice
when Alice was hopelessly perplexed
by the fluctuating realities of her Through-the-Looking-Glass world.
She complained to the Queen
she just couldn't believe in impossible things;
"That's because you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"Why, sometimes, I've believed in as many as six impossible things
before breakfast."
Alice's world has become our world.
In our world, you'd better believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
Perhaps our young people have more practice with impossible things.
Perhaps they're just more comfortable with them.
Regardless, we need to create an environment
that encourages their innovation and energizes their creativity,
an environment that enables them to reach their individual potential,
thereby expanding the golden circle of success.
The only way to achieve this
is by reforming and strengthening our educational systems.
As others have said so often,
America's economic success will be determined in America's classrooms.
I began my remarks this afternoon
by quoting from Henry Luce's essay, "The American Century."
I'd like to close with the final words of that essay,
"We have some things in our country
that are infinitely precious, and especially American:
a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity,
a tradition of self-reliance, independence, and also of cooperation.
Other nations can survive simply because they have endured so long.
Sometimes with more, and sometimes with less significance.
But this nation, conceived in adventure and dedicated to the progress of man,
this nation cannot truly endure
unless there courses strongly through its veins,
from Maine to California,
the blood of purposes, enterprise, and high resolve.
Throughout the 17th century, the 18th century, and the 19th century,
this continent teamed
with manifold projects and magnificent purposes.
Above them all,
and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of the world,
and out of all history, was the triumphal purpose of freedom.
It is in that spirit that all of us are called,
each to his own measure of capacity,
and each in the widest horizon of his vision,
to create the first great American century."
Well, my friends, those words were written 70 years ago.
They are as meaningful today as they were 70 years ago.
It did turn out to be the great American century,
and I'm convinced that with the courage of previous generations
to make the tough decisions,
together with enlightened leadership from our emerging generations,
we can and will make this the second great American century.
We just have to remember who we are.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)