Our President
Forum 2002 Address
To Shorten the Shadow: Providing High Expectations in Education
College Board President Gaston Caperton speaks at the Annual Meeting of the Members, College Board Forum 2002, November 2002, Altanta, Georgia.
At the first forum I came to four years ago, Tom Friedman was the speaker. A Pulitzer Prize winner, he talked about his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The second forum was the 100th year anniversary of the College Board, and I'll never forget that we celebrated that year at the top of the World Trade Center. Last year we were in Denver. It was soon after the Trade Center was on the ground. It was a small meeting, about half the size of this. But it was one that was filled with a certain feeling of importance; an appreciation for those who had risked coming. It was a very special meeting.
This year I would like to quote from Tom Friedman's newest book, Longitudes and Attitudes. "For Bin Laden," he said, "the Twin Towers were the symbol of a godless, corrupt, materialistic society. A society that got rich and powerful precisely because it had no values. Of course what Bin Laden never understood was that that truth was exactly the opposite. We in America are rich and powerful because of our values," Tom Friedman says. "The freedom of thought, respect for the individual, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, women's equality, philanthropy, social mobility, self-criticism, experimentation, religious pluralism. It was because of our values, not despite them.
"But for us to preserve our strength," Friedman says, "our workplaces have to be secure, our institutions strong, and our society ever vigilant of these core values. And that is why one thing Americans have learned from September 11th is to treat our firemen and our policemen, our governing institution and our regulators with renewed respect. Because they protect and preserve the bedrock of our society, our workplaces and our schools."
Our schools, Friedman says. He recognizes our schools as the bedrock of our society, and he's certainly not the first to do that. I recently read a book about Eisenhower. Before D-Day, he said to the soldiers: "There are two pillars, two towers of our democracy that we are fighting for tomorrow." One is our rights: the right to say what we want to say, the right to work where we want to work, the right to vote for whom we want to vote for, the right to work where we want to work, to worship where we want to worship, to vote, and to have trials by jury.
