Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children.  We need to set for them new and more rigorous goals.  We must demand more of ourselves and our children by raising literacy levels dramatically by the year 2000.  Our children should master the basic concepts of math and science, and let’s insist that students not leave high school until they have studied and understood the basic documents of our national heritage.  There’s one more thing we can’t let up on:  Let’s redouble our personal efforts to provide for every child a safe and drug-free learning environment.  If our crusade against drugs succeeds with our children, we will defeat that scourge all over the country.

Finally, let’s stop suppressing the spiritual core of our national being.  Our nation could not have been conceived without divine help.  Why is it that we can build a nation with our prayers, but we can’t use a schoolroom for voluntary prayer?  The 100th Congress of the United States should be remembered as the one that ended the expulsion of God from America’s classrooms.

The quest for excellence into the 21st century begins in the schoolroom but must go next to the workplace.  More than 20 million new jobs will be created before the new century unfolds, and by then, our economy should be able to provide a job for everyone who wants to work.  We must also enable our workers to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of the workplace.  And I will propose substantial, new Federal commitments keyed to retraining and job mobility.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sending the Congress a complete series of these special messages—­on budget reform, welfare reform, competitiveness, including education, trade, worker training and assistance, agriculture, and other subjects.  The Congress can give us these tools, but to make these tools work, it really comes down to just being our best.  And that is the core of American greatness.  The responsibility of freedom presses us towards higher knowledge and, I believe, moral and spiritual greatness.  Through lower taxes and smaller government, government has its ways of freeing people’s spirits.  But only we, each of us, can let the spirit soar against our own individual standards.  Excellence is what makes freedom ring.  And isn’t that what we do best?

We’re entering our third century now, but it’s wrong to judge our nation by its years.  The calendar can’t measure America because we were meant to be an endless experiment in freedom—­with no limit to our reaches, no boundaries to what we can do, no end point to our hopes.  The United States Constitution is the impassioned and inspired vehicle by which we travel through history.  It grew out of the most fundamental inspiration of our existence:  that we are here to serve Him by living free—­that living free releases in us the noblest of impulses and the best of our abilities; that we would use these gifts for good and generous purposes and would secure them not just for ourselves and for our children but for all mankind.