Bill Clinton: “Well, you have another alternative. Jerry talked about it, but I want to say again, I want to emphasize four things to…”

“Well, you have another alternative. Jerry talked about it, but I want to say again, I want to emphasize four things to you that I want to do in education, all important to Florida. Number one, 40 percent of the 8-year-olds in America cannot read a book on their own today. Part of that is because we're a nation of immigrants, we have a lot of young kids whose first language is not English. But everyone needs to be able to read in order to keep learning. I want to mobilize 30,000 people, the AmeriCorps volunteers, trained reading tutors, and others, to get a million volunteers across America to go into the schools, to work with the parents so that in 4 years we can say every 8-year-old in America can pick up a book and say, ``I can read this all by myself.'' I was in Tampa the other day at a school which was so crowded they had folks meeting in trailers next to the school, a beautiful old school. We have the largest number of schoolchildren in America today ever in history, almost 52 million. The United States Government has never helped schools with their building problems. But children cannot learn if they're in impossible, rundown, beat-up, substandard conditions without adequate equipment. So I have a program to lower the interest rates and therefore cut the costs to the taxpayers in the school districts of building those facilities or repairing them. If local people are willing to make an extra effort to help their schools, the Federal Government should be a partner and lower the cost of doing it. And I want you to help me do that. The third thing I want to do--now, when Jerry said this, all the young people clapped, and I couldn't tell whether those of us who are older were or not. Let me tell you what it means to hook up every classroom and every library to the information superhighway by the year 2000. It means for the first time in the history of America, children in the poorest school districts, children in the richest school districts, and children in all the school districts in between for the very first time will all have access to the same information in the same way at the same time. Will you help me do that? [Applause] Folks, this is a big deal. We can't turn our backs on learning. Learning is generating more jobs for us. More than half of these new jobs are high-wage jobs. That's the good news. The challenging news is if you want them, you have to know something and you have to be able to keep learning. Just in the last 4 years, learning has done the following things: We have more than doubled the life expectancy for people with HIV. We have discovered two genes that cause breast cancer, giving us hope that we can not only cure it earlier but actually someday prevent it. In the last 4 years, we have developed the first real treatment for people who have strokes--never any real medical treatment before. These are things that are happening. A lot of you heard Christopher Reeve talk at the Democratic Convention, and he talked about medical research, sitting there so bravely in his wheelchair. About the time he spoke, for the first time ever, a laboratory animal with its spine completely severed had movement in its lower limbs because of a nerve transfer to the spine from another part of the body. Learning is the answer to so many of our problems and the key to our future and to our prosperity and to our quality of life. We are working to build a supercomputer with IBM that will do more calculations in one second than you can do on your own calculator in 30,000 years. That's how much learning is going forward. So I say to you, the last thing we have to do is open the doors of college education to every American of every age at any time who needs to go. And I want you to help me do it. I want you to be able to save in an IRA and withdraw from that IRA without any tax penalty at all if you use the money on a college education. I want you to be able to do just what Jerry says: I want every community college student in America to know that we have to make at least 2 years of education after high school as universal by the year 2000 as a high school education is today, and we're going to do it by letting you just take off your tax bill dollar for dollar the cost of a tuition at any community college in the country. That's what I want you to do. And I want you to help us do it. And finally, for people that go on to college, I think you ought to be able to deduct up to $10,000 a year for the cost of any college tuition, anywhere, at any level. And I want you to help me do that. Now, I say again, your vote will decide, and whether you vote will decide. This is not a small election. The world is changing too much. The best days of this country are ahead. You will have more opportunity than any generation of Americans before if you make the right decision. But you have to decide. And the last thing I leave you with is this: We will never be what we ought to be unless we prove that our diversity is a great asset, not a liability, unless we reject the religious, the racial, the tribal, the ethnic hatreds that are consuming people all around the world. Pick up the newspaper any day and you can see it. In America, that is not for us. We stand for freedom. We stand for equal opportunity. We stand for the responsibility of every citizen and the right of every citizen to be treated equally under the law. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause] Will you be there on November 5th? [Applause] I need you. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you.”