During President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to Congress on “Urgent National Needs,” he echoed a sentiment we should heed today and I mean right now.
I am therefore transmitting to the Congress a new Manpower Development and Training program, to train or retrain several hundred thousand workers, particularly in those areas where we have seen chronic unemployment as a result of technological factors in new occupational skills over a four-year period, in order to replace those skills made obsolete by automation and industrial change with the new skills which the new processes demand.
I will further add to replace those skills changed by a networked world where millions of highly skilled technical minds in India and China are altering the world wide landscape. Bill Gates adds, “The Chinese have risk taking down, hard work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them – you are never discussing ‘give me a one-liner to embarrass [rival politicians] with.’ You are meeting with an intelligent bureaucracy.”
Our current bureaucracy had better take up Kennedy’s message, voice it, fund it and get this country moving toward solid educational achievements in math, science, engineering, technology and innovation because these skills are the foundation of our economic and political stability.
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