Bill Bennett: “there is no issue that we face in this body more serious than the challenge of educating our young people. That is not a…”

“there is no issue that we face in this body more serious than the challenge of educating our young people. That is not a cliche. That is a statement of our primary survival challenge of the future. Talk to CEO's, talk to personnel directors around the country, and they tell you more and more the primary challenge we have long term in this country is maintaining a work force that can survive international competition. Talk to many of these CEO's and they tell you that more and more of their budget is going to pay for remedial learning skills for their new hires. They are hiring people who cannot read the instructions that they are given to carry out their work. They are hiring people who cannot figure enough to even make change in a retail situation. Recognizing that the schools will not teach these people to read and figure, they are beginning to allocate more and more of their corporate dollars to give this kind of education themselves. It is potentially, as I say, Mr. President, the single most important issue we face. I think with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this has become the long-term survival issue for the United States. Yet we allow ourselves to insist that the status quo, producing these kinds of results, is what must be maintained at all costs. We allow ourselves to say we will not even experiment with a voucher system that might challenge the present monopoly.”