Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs

ASSISTANT SECRETARY PATRICIA S. HARRISON
REMARKS TO STATES INSTITUTE ON INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION IN THE SCHOOLS
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Patricia S. Harrison
Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs,
U.S. Department of State

Remarks

States Institute on International Education in the Schools
November 17, 2003
Washington, DC

Thank you.

I am delighted to be here participating in this program as the States Institute on International Education in the Schools focuses on International Education Week.

And I know we have so many States represented here tonight but let me begin with a recent experience.

Yesterday, I was in Honolulu - someone had to go - to take part in Hawaii's launch of International Education Week.

The East West Center, on whose board I serve, hosted 300 elementary school children from several schools. They participated in a variety of programs with the theme: "How Different Cultures Celebrate Gratitude or Thanks."

From African customs to Indian, Asian, Hawaii, and Latin America, Middle Eastern, the globe was represented in a very busy activity room --all of the children were wearing bright yellow t-shirts announcing International Education Week.

After a Hawaiian blessing complete with drums, I spoke to the group and asked the children to raise their hands if they had ever known a person from another country.

Almost 300 hands were raised.

And I could not help but think back to my own childhood in Brooklyn - where most of us were once removed from a relative who had immigrated to the United States - primarily from Europe - Eastern Europe and Russia. In most cases the operative word was not immigrated but fled.

We had very few students from other countries coming to P.S. 99 or Midwood High School to study or as part of an exchange program.

The concept of the foreign student was foreign and in fact, the idea of differentness was not valued. Everyone was supposed to fit in as quickly as possible, and be American.

In fact, my school never had a class trip outside of ny-because, the rational was-where was there to go.

The world has certainly compressed since by early days at P.S. 99 and now, in classrooms throughout America, we underscore for young people the benefit of learning and understanding other cultures, the values we have in common and can build upon.

The commitment and creativity represented by each of you and being carried out in the States today is having a profound impact on the successor generation.

I look forward to hearing the reports from state representatives this evening.

I am particularly pleased to learn more about the outstanding projects that will be honored tomorrow evening in the Goldman Sachs Foundation Prizes for Excellence in International Education.

International Education Week is now in its fourth year - including the year of the horrible attacks of September 11, 2001 on our country.

I remember shortly after those attacks, our First Lady Laura Bush commenting that everywhere she went, people asked her, how can I help, how can I serve?

The call to service is valued even more today. There is a new regard for those men and women who were always present in our society but never regarded as deserving of hero status.

Our teachers, our health care workers, our fire and police and armed forces men and women; our emergency care workers and a group that defines for so many who come to our country, the spirit of America, our national DNA: volunteers.

My bureau, ECA, relies on 80,000 volunteers, men and women from all walks of life, and 1500 public/private partnerships to conduct 35,000 academic and professional and cultural exchanges annually.

That includes-just to name a few--: Fulbright scholars, high school students, mid level professionals, English language teachers, artists, writers, journalists, elected officials, community leaders, entrepreneurs.

Forty percent of our exchanges comprise women - like the group of 50 women from the Middle East who came to the U.S. to observe our mid term elections.

They left, not too confused, but inspired that they could achieve as leaders in their community, in their government, as well.

Our exchange participants visit towns and cities in all regions of our country. They study at high schools in Iowa and Utah and Illinois and North and South Carolina.

They forge a bond with countless volunteers throughout the United States who offer home hospitality and take them to baseball and soccer games; Fourth of July parades and local symphony performances.

They experience first hand, the rich diversity of our country. And they are so amazed how we are so different and so alike from one another at the same time under this category called American.

They learn how our society works and experience for themselves that we are a faith based country-but of so many different faiths.

On that last point, I will never forget the group of journalists from Northern Iraq, Kurds, who came to the U.S. as part of our International Visitor Program to meet with print and broadcast journalists and to get training.

When they returned to Washington, DC, I invited them to have lunch and talk about their impressions.

One of them said, "I found out Americans don't care."

That is the last thing I wanted to hear and I guess the expression on my face communicated that pretty quickly.

No, he said, "You don't understand. We were told that Americans hate the Kurds. But I found out you don't hate us, you are not even sure who we are. And you don't care."

"You drove us to the mosque and you picked us up. It was no big deal. You don't care how we pray."

And then he said, "I want this kind of not caring for my country."

We have over 700,000 alumni of our programs. Many are recognizable names such as Hamid Karzai, the late Anwar Sadat, Lady Margaret Thatcher, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Kofi Annan.

But many are just men and women, who in their own quiet way, have built on the exchange experience, shared it with others and continue to volunteer and contribute to their communities and countries.

People like the young Fulbrighter from Syria who was studying at the University of Arizona on September 11, 2001 and was shortly interviewed by the press.

He said: "People who come to the United States to study, like myself, are the link between the United States and our people. And in the end, international exchange is the answer to global terrorism."

That's a powerful statement about what we are all working to accomplish, mutual understanding and respect among individuals and nations, to know one another beyond the stereotypes.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "As we work to end the scourge of terrorism, let us also work in partnership to increase peace, prosperity and democracy."

And that is what we are doing through international education, providing young people with the opportunity to appreciate the wealth of cultures that lie beyond our own borders; and promoting what President Bush calls the non-negotiable demands of human dignity.,

Right after September 11, as I looked at our exchange programs, I thought we needed to reach out to the Muslim world, and to reach younger and more diverse populations globally, beyond our traditional elites.

That is when we launched an initiative called Partnerships for Learning or P4L. This program was inspired by remarks made by Queen Rainia of Jordan at a conference on higher education in the Arab world, which was held in Marrakech, Morocco.

Queen Rainia spoke about the hope gap-that is the gap that exists between a growing population of global youth who have no hope for the future. They are undereducated and underemployed and susceptible to the siren song of radical Islamist extremism.

The other group does have hope for the future because someone like you, an educator, a business leader, a government official through a government program took an interest in them and ensured that they would have opportunity to contribute and they would be prepared and educated to access that opportunity.

P4L is based on the premise that all people of good will want only the best for their children and this best starts with a true education.

We will be hosting our first P4L conference in Istanbul next month and we will be discussing access to education and how to create new links between the public and private sectors; how to reach out to youth through education, sports and culture.

I anticipate that by the end of this dialogue and working with ministers of education from so many countries, we will create new and vital collaborative relationships.

Access to American higher education is an important issue both for our discussions in Istanbul and beyond.

The Institute of International Education recently issued its annual open doors report on international education in the United States.

The IIE said that higher education is the fifth largest service sector export of the U S. and that international students contribute nearly 12 billion dollars to the U.S. economy in monies spent on tuition, living expenses and related costs.

Nearly 75 percent of all international student funding comes from personal and family sources outside the United States.

These are immediate and measurable benefits of international educational exchange but there are so many more.

An outside evaluation of our exchange programs found that 97 percent of our host families believe that hosting foreign visitors promotes peaceful relations between the United States and other countries and a majority of our host families maintain contact with the exchange visitors over decades.

We also know that at a minimum, our visitors when they return to their homes share their experiences with family and friends and colleagues. we estimate that the 35,000 exchanges we sponsored just last year will over time, touch the lives of over 7 million people.

Now that is some multiplier effect.

Last year, 586,323 foreign students studied at U.S. colleges and institutions. That represents a modest increase of less than one percent over the previous year.

India and China sent the majority. And there has been a decrease of students from Middle Eastern countries.

The DOS has been working with C.A. and P.A. on our Secure Borders, Open Doors communication program and website to address the perceptions and misconceptions of what it takes to get a U.S. visa.

We are working to strike the right balance between protecting people of good will who come here and who live here and remaining an open society on which so much of our sense of national purpose and identity depends.

I believe that an investment in international education is an investment in homeland security-everyone's homeland, everyone's security.

And that means we need to reach out more and not less.

By a two to one margin, Americans oppose suggestions that we cut back on the number of foreign students allowed to study in the U.S.

While these numbers are reassuring, none of us underestimate the challenge that faces us. Unlike regions such as Europe where foreign language study has a meaningful application to the daily lives of students, our children need encouragement to study foreign languages; they need help in understanding how these skills can open doors and opportunities for them around the world. We have all seen the various studies and surveys that point out gaps in our children's understanding of geography and world history. On the encouraging side, more and more American students study abroad as part of their college experience, and they are venturing beyond traditional destinations.

Last month, I visited Baghdad and met with the presidents of all the universities in that city.

One of them said to me, you know, you cannot have a culture of prosperity unless you have a culture of real learning.

We are now through partnerships for learning announcing the start of a new Fulbright program with Iraq. As soon as this coming January, we will welcome approximately 20 Iraqi students and professors to the United States.

The Iraqis want so much to reconnect with the world, to be able to come to the U.S. and restart their learning and then return to their country and be part of Iraq's education renewal.

Rami Rudainey, who is 22 and a political science major said, "In my field of study, politics, all it concerned was Saddam."

Iraq because of Saddam - now has an illiteracy rate for women of 77 percent.

And we have reached younger populations. This past September, through Partnerships for Learning we had our first high school group of teenagers, boys and girls from Muslim majority countries.

130 students started high school throughout the United States. I asked one young woman from Egypt-what is your impression so far.

She said, "I have a question. Why do people keep asking me what it is like to ride a camel? I have never been on a camel in my life."

This year in the United States will help Americans understand her culture beyond camels. At the same time, we are hearing from these students who are so excited about discovering the real America so much better than the one portrayed in their media.

We hear from various sources about how our exchange visitors teach us about their own cultures and traditions - such as the high school student from Egypt who is studying in Wisconsin and spoke to a local senior center about her life in Egypt or the Pakistani student who cooked Tandoori chicken for her host family in Carter Lake, Iowa.

A young Fulbrighter from China once said to me: "We want Americans to know more about us. About our culture." My response was: "Americans want to know more about you and we want you to know more about us - the true spirit and core values of our country - so we can both move beyond the stereotypes."

In my role as Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs, I am so honored to meet with the people who come to our country as part of our exchange programs. They give me a new way of looking at America and the world.

A Nigerian came here as part of our civil society International Visitor Program and spent time in Ohio.

She said, "Americans really know their history."

"We do?" I asked, surprised to hear that.

"Oh yes you do." And then she summed up our Constitution and Declaration of Independence in one sentence.

"Yes, you know your history. I mean you know your rights. I want my people to have rights and know what they are."

Or the Afghan women teachers who came here to study at the University of Nebraska so they would be prepared to train other teachers in Afghanistan.

They had taught young girls despite threats and torture by the Taliban.

"How did you find the courage to do this," I asked.

"It wasn't courage," said one of the teachers. "It was just the right thing to do."

That was my lesson in leadership-a courageous definition. Knowing the right thing to do and doing it.

ECA is working to expand programs such as our Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program in which we place teaching assistants from other countries in our American universities and in this way help to increase the numbers of teachers of English and give them a chance to increase their proficiency.

We are using all the tools of technology as well as the time tested traditional approach represented by exchanges to connect Americans with people of other countries.

And we must do all of this because this is the only time we have. So it is the best time.

We cannot waste the lives of our young people or the lives of any young person wherever he or she lives at a time when they are open and eager and ready to accumulate knowledge and find their place in the world.

We can never stop and declare victory-the job is done. It is not the end of history. We will always have the same work to do over and over again as new generations will have the same needs.

Someone once asked when is the best time to plant an oak tree.

And the answer is 25 years ago.

So when is the second best time?

That would be -now.

I applaud each and every one of you as you seek ways to ensure that the young people in your state have the tools they need to engage, to learn, to contribute to their world.

I thank you for all the oak trees you have already planted and I look forward working with you in partnership to plant new ones.

Thank you.

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