June 6, 1998

Clinton Urges 'Technology Literacy' for Middle Schoolers

By JAMES BENNET

INCOLN, Mass. -- President Clinton called on states Friday to impose a "technology literacy" requirement on all children in middle school, declaring that "students should feel as comfortable with a keyboard as a chalkboard."

Even as Congress squared off with him Friday over the spending programs he proposed this year, Clinton said that he would seek $180 million in next year's budget to train teachers in states that adopt such a requirement.

"We shouldn't let a child graduate from middle school anymore without knowing how to use new technologies to learn," he said, in a graduation address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

In a 26-minute speech as sunny and breezy as the day, Clinton assured the graduates that they were living in "a period of renewal." He dwelled on the wonders of the information age, a favorite topic for the president though he seldom uses a computer himself and confessed to the graduates Friday that he was "scientifically challenged."

The White House was vague about the nature of the proposed middle school requirement. Joseph Lockhart, a White House spokesman, said that the states would set their own standards but that Clinton expected them to include such skills as knowing how to communicate by computer using "appropriate Internet etiquette" and knowing how to use a spread sheet.

Ten states already test technological skills, mostly among high school students. Under the federal program Clinton proposed, the government would provide financing for three years to help train teams of teachers to train others.

Friday afternoon, Clinton arrived here to open the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, a project of Don Henley, the former drummer for the Eagles rock group who is a friend of the president. The institute is intended to spread the work of Henry David Thoreau, who built a cabin in the woods by the pond here to ponder nature and self-reliance.

As he recalled Thoreau's goal of living "deeply and deliberately," Clinton mused over the short walk he and Hillary Rodham Clinton had taken before the ceremony. He provided a rare glimpse of his view of the peculiar life in the White House.

"Back when we had real lives, we used to walk in the woods a lot," he said. "And so to be able to come here and only be able to walk 200 yards so that our friends with the cameras could at least get a good picture so the American people could get a real feel for the magnificent work that's been done here -- it winds up almost being more real to them than it is to us sometimes."

Before coming here, Clinton stopped for lunch at the home of Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination of his father, Robert F. Kennedy. Clinton visited the house with Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel, and other Kennedy relatives.

On its flight to Boston this morning with the president aboard, Air Force One disappeared twice for a total of 56 seconds from the Gibbsboro, N.J., radar of the Federal Aviation Administration. The same radar briefly lost track of Air Force One on March 10, again when Clinton was aboard. The aviation agency said it was investigating.