U.S. Department of State

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Office of the Spokesman For Immediate Release September 18, 2007 2007/771

REMARKS

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Remarks at Cornerstone School's 10th Anniversary Dinner

September 17, 2007 Washington, D.C.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you. Thank you very much. First, I'm delighted to be here for the 10th anniversary celebration of the Cornerstone Schools of Washington, D.C. We're very grateful to our wonderful hosts the Castellanetas. Thank you very much for having us here. You may not know, but Gianni and I have actually been colleagues and friends now for some time. He was the Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Berlusconi when I was the National Security Advisor to President Bush and it's a rather small club. The other night we had a chance to say farewell to David Manning, who was Foreign Policy Advisor at the same time. It seems that Foreign Policy Advisors and National Security Advisors do all right after those jobs. But Gianni, I want you to know that not only do I value your friendship and that of your wife, but also the United States of America values the friendship of Italy, which has been a dear friend. Thank you. (Applause.)

I'm also very pleased to share the podium tonight with Paul Gigot, an outstanding journalist, a great member of the fourth estate, as Mr. Jefferson would have called it. And Paul, thank you for your dedication to education. I know you were here five years ago. Thank you very much for being here and for being our Master of Ceremonies. (Applause.)

Well, ladies and gentlemen, as I was reading about the Cornerstone Schools and the emphasis on academic excellence, the emphasis on parental involvement, the emphasis on spiritual development, it occurred to me that I feel very strongly that I share something very much in common with the Cornerstone Schools and that is that if you put this in rather shorthand, I think the Cornerstone Schools are devoted to faith, family and education. And indeed, I've been fortunate in my own life to come from a family and from a community in which those pillars -- faith, family and education -- were intertwined and all valued greatly.

Indeed, they come together perhaps best in a little story about my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, John Wesley Rice, Sr., who was a sharecropper's son in Eutaw -- that's E-w-t-a-h -- Alabama. (Laughter.) And there in Ewtah, Alabama, he decided for some reason when he was a young man in his very early twenties that he wanted to get “book learning.” Now, why this sharecropper's son would want to get “book learning,” I don't know, but I do know that he 2 9/17/2007 succeeded because he would ask people as they would come by this small town, "How could a colored man," as they called people -- black people in those days -- "how could a colored man go to college?" And they said, "Well, you see, there's this little Presbyterian college down the road about sixty miles in Tuscaloosa, it's called Stillman College, and you could probably go there."

So my grandfather saved up his cotton. He took his cotton, sold it, and went off to Stillman College and he paid his first year through college. Then came the second year. And they said, "All right. You have to pay now for a second year." And he said, "But I'm out of cotton. I don't have anymore money." They said, "Well, then you'll have to leave." And he said, "Well, how are those boys going to college," pointing at some other kids. And they said, "Well, you see, they have what's called a scholarship. And if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister then you could have a scholarship too." (Laughter.) My grandfather said, "You know, that's exactly what I had in mind." (Laughter.) And ever since, my family has been both Presbyterian and college educated. (Laughter.)

I'm very grateful that I had grandparents and then parents who understood the value of education. And so I'm grateful on behalf of the wonderful students, the great choir that we just saw and the many students like them attending the Cornerstone Schools, that there are parents and teachers who value education for them. Because without adults who care that children are educated, that children have opportunity, it most certainly will not happen. And so to the students I would say thank you for that great performance. It shows that they are not afraid of hard work and they're not afraid of doing something hard. It's hard to sing in front of a group like this. To parents who are giving their children an opportunity and who are working in the classrooms, that's terrific, and to teachers who perhaps have no idea how really influential they are. I'm certain that each and every one of us remembers some very influential teacher from our past who got us on the right way, maybe as early as elementary school, maybe in high school, maybe in college. But most certainly somewhere along the way, there were teachers. There's no greater profession, no greater gift than to be a great teacher.

Why is education so important? Well, we often talk about education as the key to a better life, the key to a better job. We all know the statistics that it's really not possible in today's modern society to have a well-paying, sustaining job without the value of education. And indeed, we know that the better educated you are, the better you are likely to do in terms of economic progression and in terms of economic well-being. We know, too, that it is the foundation for better things in life to be well-educated.

But I would suggest to you that I'd like to spend just a moment setting aside this rather instrumental view of education and why it's important. Of course, we want our kids to be able to get a good job and to have families and to provide for them, but don't we want more for them? Don't we want them to be able to take advantage of the truly transformative nature of education? Education isn't just a way to a job, education is a way to remake yourself. Education is a way to have no limits on your horizons. Education is a way, in a sense, to be born anew. Education is a way to completely and totally become who you should be, who you want to be, who you ought to be. It opens the mind. It opens the heart. It opens the horizons. A quality education, then, is at the core of what it is to become fully and completely a human being able to reach full potential. 3 9/17/2007

Again, I think that perhaps when I think back on my grandfather's story, maybe that's what he understood. Maybe that's why he wanted to get “book learning.” Not because he thought, somehow, that it was going to make him better at farming or richer at farming, but because he knew that somehow it was going to open up new horizons to him. And because he did that, and because he insisted that his children have those same opportunities, and because they insisted, then, that their children have those same opportunities, I stand before you today. I stand before you today as somebody who understands one other important thing about education and that is that if it does not limit your horizons, it opens up horizons that you might never have seen.

My own story is perhaps instructive in that way. You see, when I was three, I learned to play the piano because my grandmother taught piano lessons and I was going to be a concert pianist. There was absolutely no doubt about it. And so I studied and I practiced. And then in my sophomore year in college I went off to the Aspen Music School, where a lot of prodigies went to school. And I heard them play and I thought, “that eleven-year-old is better at this than I will ever be.” And I thought I could end up playing piano bar. I might end up playing at Nordstrom's. (Laughter.) But I'm not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall. Therefore, I have to have to find something else to do with my life. And I went back to college and I had that uncomfortable conversation with my parents: "Mom and Dad, I'm changing my major."

"To what are you changing your major?"

"I don't know. I'm just changing it."

My father: "You're going to end up a waitress at Howard Johnson's because you don't know what you want to be."

"I would rather be a waitress at Howard Johnson's than teach piano. After all, it's my life."

"Yes, but after all, it's our money. Find a major."

(Laughter.)

And I went back to college and I tried a little bit of everything. I was really expanding my horizons. English literature -- I hated it. State and local government -- I hated it. And then in my junior year -- the spring semester of my junior year -- with the registrar one step behind me saying, "if you don't declare a major you won't be able to register again," I took a course in international politics taught by a Soviet specialist, a man named Josef Korbel, who incidentally is Madeleine Albright's father.

And Josef Korbel opened a world to me that I would never have known. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to study Russia. Now someone, perhaps my parents, might have asked, "Why would a nice black girl from Birmingham, Alabama want to study Russia? As far as we can tell, you don't have any Russian genes." (Laughter.) But you know, it didn't matter. It was a little bit like love; you can't quite explain it. I wanted to study Russia. 4 9/17/2007

And so I did change my major and I went through graduate school and I ended up teaching at Stanford University and a few years later, I went to work for George H.W. Bush as his Soviet specialist in the White House. And there was one day when President Gorbachev had been here in Washington and President Bush asked me to accompany him back out to California and we were taking off from the South Lawn in Marine One, the helicopter, taking Gorbachev -- just Gorbachev, his wife, and me -- out to Andrews Air Force Base to go to California. And it hit me; I'm really glad I changed my major. (Laughter.)

So you see, you never know where education is going to lead, and that's the wonderful thing about education. And that's why the kids who are experiencing a great education at the Cornerstone schools have so much to be thankful for in parents and teachers and friends and community that care. But you know, it's not just critical to them. It's critical to our country, too. In many ways, the greatest investment that we can make in our well-being, in our national security, is in education.

Now I very often say that the greatest enhancement of our national security and the greatest threat to it really is in how we treat education. Now you might find the Secretary of State saying that to be a little odd, but let me tell you for a moment what I mean. If Americans are well educated, if they are capable of acquiring the skills and the talents and expanding those talents for the future, then we are not going to be a fearful country about our place in the world. We're going to be able to trade freely, we're going to be able to open our markets, we're going to be able to compete, we're going to know that whatever else those countries do, they're never going to make it impossible for Americans to compete and to win because we're going to be confident in our skills and confident in the skills that we're giving to our children to compete in that world.

What is more, we're going to continue to be a place of creativity, a place that's risk-taking, a place that's not afraid to take a chance, a place that's not afraid to start a company in a garage in Northern California, have that one fail and start over again, because we're going to have a foundation, a foundation of knowledge and skills development and a foundation that will let us know that yes, our creativity and our leadership and our technological edge is always going to be there for us. And by the way, if our kids aren't educated, then we will be fearful and we won't be creative and we won't be certain and ultimately we won't lead.

But there is one other way in which education is so critical to us as a nation. It's because it's at the core of who we are. We're a great multiethnic democracy. A great multiethnic democracy has to be a place in which it doesn't matter where you came from; it matters where you are going. There's a simple bargain at the core of what it is to be American and that bargain is that if you work hard and you're not afraid to take chances and you're not afraid to put yourself on the line, if you're willing to be guaranteed only opportunity, not outcome, if you're willing to take the hard work and put it forward, then you're going to have a good chance to succeed.

It's a kind of bargain between the citizen and the society, the citizen and the government. It's an opportunity to succeed, not a guarantee, and it's a knowledge that there are no easy roads. I noticed the emphasis on academic excellence and I thought, "no easy roads." You know, I'll tell you that one of the first things that I was attracted to then-Governor Bush for was actually his 5 9/17/2007 views on education, because he had a phrase about education that really captured it for me. He talked about not giving in to “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Too often, if children don't come from privilege, too often, if they are of another color, our expectations are that maybe they're not quite up to it, maybe they can't quite take that tough curriculum, maybe we have to coddle them a little bit and give them self-esteem based on telling them that they've succeeded even if they haven't. Well, you know, it's going to backfire because somewhere along the way, they're going to realize that actually, maybe they haven't quite learned what they should have learned, maybe they're not quite as good as what they've been told.

Of course, people and children need to be encouraged in their education. Of course, they need to be told that they can do it. But then they have to do it, and that means being as demanding of each and every child as we would be of our own children. That commitment to excellence, that commitment to hard work is supposed to be rewarded with opportunity and with the ability to move forward. And you know, that bargain is more than a bargain with individuals; it's a bargain that we as a society make to each other. It is the source of our optimism. It is the source of our cohesion. It is our source of always believing that tomorrow is another day and maybe, therefore, it's a better day.

It is what has sustained Americans, whether the pioneers who managed to come over the continental divide in ways that I do not understand, or my ancestors who managed to go from three-fifths of a man in the Constitution to equal citizenship, to a point at which one of their descendants stands before you as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States. It's that faith, that optimism, that belief that is at the core of who we are.

Thank you for believing in the vital role of education in who we are. Thank you.

(Applause.)