Remarks by Ross Perot

This is a great opportunity for us all coming together today. 

I understand that our focus today is on how to improve our public schools.  

We must focus on the lives of our children and their futures. 

Technology will be a big part in properly educating our children, which will make education more cost effective and exciting, but first, last, and always are the children and providing them with the finest education system in the world.

If our children are put first, and everything we do in education is calculated to improve their lives, we will succeed. 

I listened with interest as various groups today talked about the problems in the public schools, and how to solve them. 

What we do now in education is see a problem, spend a fortune, and wonder why it didn’t work.  If I wanted to build a bridge without coming up with a blueprint or concept, you would fire me and hire a team that uses the engineering process.

My advice to you is very simple.  When schools across our state have a problem, put together what I call a small Delta team or Swat team of the best minds.   Assign them the responsibility to go out, gather information and get a consensus of solutions to the problem.   

First, go through the engineering process and develop a conceptual plan.   Only in America would you go from noble concept, to mass production, to failure, and wonder why.  Once we have the noble concept, we must develop a detailed plan on paper – a blueprint.

This plan must be designed in a modular way, because we know that there will be things that we forgot to include, or things we will have to take out and fix. 

The next step must be to pilot test the plan – and finally mass produce throughout our schools.   Once we have the plan working successfully during the pilot phase, and it is built in a modular fashion so that it can modified incrementally, we know it is the proper solution.

You must all pledge to one another that once the plan is in place, you can make it better every day, and can change it incrementally by adding new modules or improving the existing modules.

It took 2 million years to reach a billion people on the planet.  This occurred in 1800.  We are now up to 6 billion.  We added 1 billion in just 12 years.  If the birth rate remains at current levels, the human population will go to 50 billion by 2100.  The lowest forecast I’ve seen is 30 billion. 

Where does the U.S. fit in?  Right now we have 300 million people.  Where does China fit in?  They have 1.3 billion people – think of that.  And where is India? 1.1 million people, and scheduled to pass China in the next 20-30 years. 

If you fly through China and land at any of their big cities, you won’t believe the growth, and the skyscrapers that are there.  What is their secret? - a well educated population.  And how did they get that? In a very odd way.

I learned 26 characters, 10 numbers and that’s it.  An uneducated Chinaman can draw 2,000 symbols.  Think of the hand-eye coordination that comes with drawing the symbols. 

An educated Chinaman can draw 8,000 symbols. 

Imagine the neuron connections – and hand-eye coordination that comes from this.

The people in India are very smart.  They speak English.  They don’t have that magic with all the symbols.  One day I called a group of Indians together that work in my company, and I said, “Why are you so much smarter than we are?”  They were very modest, very shy.  They wouldn’t tell me.  One finally said, “You know, if there is any secret, I think it probably is that in order to talk to the children in my neighborhood, I had to learn 12 different dialects by the time I was 2 years old.”  That is a neuron connector!

We are born like an unwired computer.  The only thing that works the day you are born are the neurons that are connected in your brain that allows you to breath, that lets your heart beat, and regulates your body temperature.  You can’t see, you can’t hear .  A few days later the neurons start to connect and you can see – and hear - 1,000 trillion neuron connections can be made in the brain!

The brain cells are kept alive by blood.  The blood vessels in one body – end on end – 125,000 miles

We now know a great deal about how a child’s brain develops.  This knowledge should be a major force in planning our nation’s schools.

• The human brain grows into billions of cells before a baby is born.

• Each cell has its own circuit in the brain.

• When a baby comes into the world, the brain is a jumble of disconnected neurons all waiting to be connected – like a computer whose circuits have not been wired.

• Some of these neurons have already been connected and they allow the baby to breathe, control heartbeats and regulate body temperature.

• A thousand trillion possible connections have not yet been made.

• The experiences a small child has determines whether or not the child taps his full intellectual capacity.

• Babies even have to learn how to see.

• If a baby is blindfolded for six months, the baby will be blind for life.

• When a baby is six months old, it weighs less than 20% of what it will weigh as an adult, but the brain has grown to one-half of its adult weight.

• By the time a baby is six years old, the brain has grown to 90% of its adult weight and it begins to get rid of unused circuits.

• The learning window is birth to 10 years.

• The circuits that represent the sounds that form words are wired by the age of one year.

• The words a child hears before the child is two years old impact the total capacity of his vocabulary. 

• Math and logic wiring takes place from birth to four years.

• The learning window for music is from three to ten years.

• A child learns to think well of himself or poorly of himself by the time he is 18 months old.

• And learns how to learn or fails to learn by the time he is three years old.

With this knowledge, it is obvious that our traditional concepts regarding public education must be altered, particularly for disadvantaged children.

There’s one small part of the brain that is very precious to all of us in this room – and that is the creative part of the brain.  It’s about the size of a walnut.  It can only get wired between birth and 3 years. 

The activities a baby has in his or her life during that period determine whether or not a child will be creative.  I’ve seen a number of studies on creative people.  Many of them came from rural areas.  Nearly all of the children had invisible friends.  Most of them had to create their toys from wooden boxes.  They got wired. 

Contrast that with just sitting around watching television. 

Our biggest challenge of all is to get our children wired. 

The ability of the neurons to connect starts to shut down at age 6, when children start to school.  The brain must be wired much earlier.

One of the most exciting people in education is a lady who figured that out in 1970.  Her name is Terry Ford, Director of East Dallas Community School.

I supported her efforts.  She took the poorest children in Dallas at 3 years old.  She kept them in her school – breakfast, lunch, dinner – 12 months a year.  They only went home at night to sleep with an aunt, an uncle, or whoever they had.  They attended her school until they finished the third grade.  Then, they were bussed all over Dallas - and 80% were on the honor roll! 

I rest my case – Isn’t that wonderful! 

Many of Terry’s children were minorities at a time when the most elite colleges were trying to find minorities smart enough to receive scholarships.  These children got full scholarships to some of our most elite schools.  They soared like eagles there, and they have gone on to do great things in their lives.  They were very proud of what they could do.  They outperformed most of the kids in the public schools, so that made them understand that they weren’t a nobody from nowhere – they had great self-esteem.

Terry Ford has successfully created a number of charter schools across Texas.   

These are examples of things we can do, and the sooner we start the sooner we finish - but it even gets better.

A number of years ago a lady in Tennessee, Donna Blevins, decided that she wanted to take the most underprivileged children in her area and teach them to read, write, and do all sorts of things, using laptop computers. 

She later sent me videos of these little boys and girls that really didn’t have a family unit.  They didn’t have anything.

They were on fire working with the computer - She had them writing letters and numbers at age 1 - She had them doing simple reading, writing and math at age 2 – And then one day she called me and said she wanted to see if some of them could learn Algebra at age 3 – THEY DID!

Today, Texas ranks 42 in the 50 states in Math performance.

They were getting their neurons connected, right?  I think that is our biggest challenge, because no matter how hard we work, if we come in at a time after you can no longer connect those neurons, we’re just hammering on concrete. 

Please keep that in mind.

When I was growing up during the Depression, all of my teachers were the daughters of parents who had enough money to send them to college, because they loved them so much.  The two opportunities they had coming out of college were teacher or nurse.  My teachers could have been on Wall Street today, making huge salaries.  I had incredible teachers. 

Let’s go back to our public schools.  One of my saints is Wendy Kopp, who recruits the brightest college graduates across the country to give two years of their lives to “Teach for America.”

Her goal was to get talented women from our most elite universities to teach for 2 years.  She would send me films.

Today we have to really work to get the best and brightest teachers.  Technology can really help them.

Don’t accept the fact that I’m right – Just take a look at the facts – See if it works - And then go through the engineering process - Pilot test it before you mass produce.

I can assure you that people like Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, and others in the computer industry will help you any way they can to make this possible. 

Let’s assume we have what we consider perfect software. 

And then somebody comes in with a better idea. 

We can download it overnight. 

Contrast that to printing another school book.

Let’s follow the engineering process.  Let’s go low and slow on this one.  Instead of having all these school books that you lumber in and out of school with, and they become obsolete every few years – You can download every few days, or as often as you want to, on millions of computers, and update it. 

How many books can be stored? 

The current IPOD has a disk a little bigger than a silver dollar, and it will store 33 million pages of print.  They will not only have all the books they need – They could have the school library, if you wanted it in there!

You can go to Tennessee to see everything that Mrs. Bevins does.  You can see everything that Terry Ford is doing in Dallas. 

Confirm with the doctors that the brain really is the way I say it is – that once you are 6 years of age, the ability of neurons starts to shut down.  That creative part needs to begin early because that’s where all the Edisons will come from.    Their early childhood experiences wired their brains and shaped their lives.

It’s really interesting to look at the backgrounds of those who had the creative minds – look at how they grew up, and you will see that they really were getting their neurons connected.

Let’s assume the education plan appears to be perfect.  Realize you can always improve it. 

First, pilot test your new creative ideas.    

There are many companies in the United States that do not want to be bothered by somebody too young or inexperienced, with a creative idea.  They want their people to be robots.

Over the years, we teach everyone to listen, listen, listen to the customer for creative ideas, and listen to the people who work directly with our customers for creative ideas. 

Again and again the creative ideas that made a huge difference in my company’s success (and I’m sure this will also be true in the schools’ success) came from people too young and too inexperienced to have the idea.  They didn’t know any better, and said, “Why don’t we do this?” 

Keep an environment where people are constantly coming in with better ways to do things.  Let’s have a system in the Texas public schools using the internet so that every school in the state can have access to new ideas that work, overnight. 

This is the kind of thing that we can do that would make all the difference in the world in education. 

The sooner we start, we will be a role model for the nation. 

We cannot be complacent.  We cannot be like the high school football player that scored on Friday night and never scored again. 

We are so proud of all that our country has done in the past, but we need to look at where we are now in the world.  We need to look at where we are going in the world.

That’s the main story I have to tell you today.  Education is so important that we must always recognize that no matter where we are in public education, we must work tirelessly to make it better. 

I have often been asked – If I could have three wishes for our country, what would they be –

1. A strong, moral, ethical base

2. A strong family unit in every home

3. The finest public schools in the world!

THANK YOU FOR CARING ABOUT OUR CHILDREN, AND YOUR DETERMINATION TO GIVE THEM THE WORLD’S FINEST PUBLIC SCHOOLS!