Today, President Obama delivered his third annual “Back to School” speech from Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, D.C.
The next generation of American leaders is hitting the books again, and the challenges they face today are greater than ever. The quality of education they receive is central to our Nation’s future, as well as to producing the workforce needed to maintain American leadership in the next century.
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) today permeate the classroom, the home, the boardroom, manufacturing services, and even entertainment. The information revolution, spawned by striking scientific and technological advances, has triggered profound social and economic changes throughout the world, resulting in an intensely competitive global marketplace, with prime job opportunities increasingly available only to those with technical and critical thinking skills.
That’s one reason why the President’s American Jobs Act is so important. It promises to modernize at least 35,000 schools across the country by building new science labs and Internet-ready classrooms while preventing up to 280,000 teacher layoffs.
The degree to which our Nation prospers in the 21st century will depend upon our abilities to develop scientific and technical talent in our youth, to provide lifelong learning to a well-educated workforce able to embrace the rapid pace of technological change, and to raise the level of public scientific and technological literacy. Consider this fact: the unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.3 percent. That’s less than half of what it is for workers who only completed high school (9.6 percent) and a third of those who never finished high school (14.3 percent).
Fonte: White House