every single one of you has something to offer. and you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. thats the opportunity an education can provide.
maybe you could be a great writer -- maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper -- but you might not know it until you write that english paper -- that english class paper thats assigned to you. maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor -- maybe even good enough to come up with the next iphone or the new medicine or vaccine -- but you might not know it until you do your project for your science class. maybe you could be a mayor or a senator or a supreme court justice -- but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.
and no matter what you want to do with your life, i guarantee that youll need an education to do it. you want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? you want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? youre going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. you cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. youve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.
and this isnt just important for your own life and your own future. what you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. the future of america depends on you. what youre learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
youll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and aids, and to develop new energy
technologies and protect our environment. youll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. youll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
we need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. if you dont do that -- if you quit on
school -- youre not just quitting on yourself, youre quitting on your country.
now, i know its not always easy to do well in school. i know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
i get it. i know what its like. my father left my family when i was two years old, and i was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasnt always able to give us the things that other kids had. there
were times when i missed having a father in my life. there were times when i was lonely and i felt like i didnt fit in.
so i wasnt always as focused as i should have been on school, and i did some things im not proud of, and i got in more
trouble than i should have. and my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
but i was -- i was lucky. i got a lot of second chances, and i had the opportunity to go to college and law school and follow my dreams. my wife, our first lady michelle obama, she has a similar story. neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didnt have a lot of money. but they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
some of you might not have those advantages. maybe you dont have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. maybe someone in your family has lost their job and theres not enough money to go around. maybe you live in a neighborhood where you dont feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know arent right.
but at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what youve got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. thats no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. there is no excuse for not trying.
where you are right now doesnt have to determine where youll end up. no ones written your destiny for you, because here in america, you write your own
destiny. you make your own future.
thats what young people like you are doing every day, all across america.young people like jazmin perez, from roma,
texas. jazmin didnt speak english when she first started school. neither of her parents had gone to college. but she worked hard, earned good grades, and got a scholarship to brown university -- is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to becoming dr. jazmin perez.
im thinking about andoni schultz, from los altos, california, whos fought brain cancer since he was three. hes had to endure all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which
affected his memory, so it took him much longer -- hundreds of extra hours -- to do his schoolwork. but he never fell behind. hes headed to college this fall.
and then theres shantell steve, from my hometown of chicago, illinois. even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods in the city, she managed to get a job at a local health care center, start a program to keep
young people out of gangs, and shes on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
and jazmin, andoni, and shantell arent any different from any of you. they face challenges in their lives just like you do. in some cases theyve got it a lot worse off than many of you. but they refused to give up. they chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves. and i expect all of you to do the same.
thats why today im calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education -- and do everything you can to meet them. your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending some time each day reading a book. maybe youll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. maybe youll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like i do, that all young people deserve a safe environment to study and learn. maybe youll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. and along those lines, by the way, i hope all of you are washing your hands a lot, and that you stay home from school when you dont feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
but whatever you resolve to do, i want you to commit to it. i want you to really work at it.
i know that sometimes you get that sense from tv that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or
basketball or being a reality tv star. chances are youre not going to be any of those things.
the truth is, being successful is hard. you wont love every subject that you study. you wont click with every teacher that you have. not every homework assignment will seem
completely relevant to your life right at this minute. and you wont necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try. thats okay. some of the most successful people in the world are the ones whove had the most failures. j.k. rowlings -- who wrote harry potter -- her first harry potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published. michael jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. but he once said, i have failed over and over and over again in my life. and thats why i succeed.
these people succeeded because they understood that you cant let your failures define you -- you have to let your failures teach you. you have to let them show you what to do
differently the next time. so if you get into trouble, that doesnt mean youre a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act right. if you get a bad grade, that doesnt mean youre stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
no ones born being good at all things. you become good at things through hard work. youre not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. you dont hit every note the first time you sing a song. youve got to practice. the same principle applies to your schoolwork. you might have to do a math
problem a few times before you get it right. you might have to read something a few times before you understand it. you definitely have to do a few drafts of a paper before its good enough to hand in.
dont be afraid to ask questions. dont be afraid to ask for help when you need it. i do that every day. asking for help isnt a sign of weakness, its a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you dont know something,
and that then allows you to learn something new. so find an adult that you trust -- a parent, a grandparent or teacher, a
coach or a counselor -- and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
and even when youre struggling, even when youre
discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you, dont ever give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
the story of america isnt about people who quit when things got tough. its about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.