CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- America's schoolchildren must have a basic grasp of computers and the Internet, President Clinton declared today, calling on states to make "technological literacy" a requirement for leaving middle school.
Speaking to the largest graduating class of the nation's citadel of high-tech learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clinton said the states, the federal government, and the private sector must work to erase the "digital divide" between rich and poor schools.
"All students should feel as comfortable with a keyboard as a chalkboard, as comfortable with a laptop as a textbook," he told the 2,400 graduates, their families, friends, and faculty.
Clinton warned some of the most privileged students in the United States that the rest of society would fall behind if it did not get a grounding in the rudiments of computers at a early age. And he argued that wide disparities between poor and rich communities' access to the Internet might consign many to a life of second-class citizenship.
"It is now possible for a child in the most isolated inner-city neighborhood or rural community to have access to the same world of knowledge, at the same instant, as the child in the most affluent suburb," Clinton said. "We shouldn't let a child graduate from middle school anymore without knowing how to use new technologies to learn."
He promised to provide US$180 million in government money over three years beginning in 2000 to train teachers to help provide that fluency. That would work out to about $20,000 per school.
White House staff members said the plan is for one teacher to be trained in each school, then to train others. Eight states -- Alabama, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Texas -- already require either a computer technology course or a demonstration that a student is competent in the field.
Clinton also called on large phone companies to provide discounted Internet access to poor areas as mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Major companies have argued that the program will lead to higher phone bills for many consumers -- AT&T and MCI are planning to charge residential customers a 5 percent fee in July -- and they are seeking to repeal the act in Congress. They have found a sympathetic hearing from both Democratic and Republican legislators.
"Thousands of poor schools and libraries and rural health center are in desperate need of discounts," Clinton said. "If we really believe that we all belong in the information age, then at this sunlit moment of prosperity we can't leave anyone behind in the dark."
Affluent schools are nearly three times as likely as poorer schools to have Internet access in the classroom, Clinton said. White students are more than twice as likely as blacks to have computers in their homes.
Clinton urged private companies, such as those in Silicon Valley, "to invest in a school, embrace a community in need, endow an eager young mind with opportunity."
