Bill Clinton: “The first thing we should be doing, in my opinion, is asserting that the dividing line between vocational education and…”

“The first thing we should be doing, in my opinion, is asserting that the dividing line between vocational education and academic education in the world of the future is an artificial dividing line. If anybody doubts that, they ought to just take a random tour of factories in America today and see how many factory workers there are running very complex machines with computer programs and a thousand other examples that you well know. I can only tell you what we have tried to do and what I think we should do. The reason I pushed the development of this school-to-work program when I became President is that I had seen the same sort of thing you were talking about, on the one hand, and on the other hand, I had seen young people who were in vocational programs very often not getting the level of vocational training they needed because it's much more sophisticated now. So what we decided we ought to do is to bring the business community, in effect, into the schools and bring the students into the businesses and let young people make up their minds and let young people who chose, in effect, a kind of vocational option to do it in a way that they would know was not closing future doors. If they decided they wanted to go to a 4-year college later on or they decided they wanted to pursue a different career later on, they could do it. That's the whole idea of school-to-work, is to set up a partnership between the employers in the community and the schools so that the idea of working and learning are--these ideas are compatible, not two different things, and so that if young people decide they want to go into the workplace, they will have an adequate amount of training to be worth enough to you so that you will give them a decent income and they can earn more as they go along and they're not foreclosing the option of taking a different path if, after a few years, they want to go back and go to school. I think that a lot of the things that I have to do involve, well, do we have the right program, you know, do we have the right kind of incentives to go to college? Well, a lot of it is just making sure we're thinking right about this, because most of the decisions made every day by Americans are not made by anybody in Government, they're made by all the rest of you. So it's the way we think about these problems very often that determines whether we accomplish them. And if you look at the level of work being done at Northrup Grumman and any number of other companies today, it is a very foolish and outdated idea to have this old-fashioned dividing line between this is academic and respectable and this is vocational and not quite as good. We need to abolish the line, and that's what our school-to-work program has tried to do. Mr. Kittle. Mr. President, in closing, would you like to go back to that sample math question, give us the answer, and explain how the United States students are compared to students in other countries?”