Condoleezza Rice: Education system making young Americans ‘unemployable’

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told told an audience Friday at The Heritage Foundation she believes that America’s educational system is creating a generation that is unemployable and destined to live on welfare.

“The educational crisis that we face particularly in K-12 education may well be the greatest threat to our national security,” Rice said. “The educational system continues to threaten to create weak links, and a democracy is only as strong as its weakest link.”

She sees this crisis creating “unemployable people” who are becoming destined to lifetimes on welfare.

“They ultimately will be on the dole because there will be nowhere else to go,” Rice said. “So many of them are unfit for military service let alone for jobs in other sectors.

“We can’t tolerate the situation where you can look at the zip code and determine if you are going to get a good education.”

Rice warned that problems at home should not be an excuse for ignoring America’s role in the world – especially in the Middle East.

“It’s fashionable to say that we should adopt a policy that finally frees us from dependence on Middle Eastern oil,” Rice said. “We should build North American platforms for everything from oil and gas to transportation to build energy security, but we know that we can never be insulated from the Middle East.

“One way or another the malignancies of the Middle East will come back to haunt us just as they did on 9/11.”

The United States has given up a strategic view of the Middle East that Rice sees as shortsighted and dangerous since Barack Obama became president. The key to this strategy in her opinion means reaffirming ties to Israel and pressing friendly states in the Arab world to bring about political reforms.

“The Mubarak situation didn’t need to work out the way that it did,” Rice said. Rice recalls the efforts she made in 2005 to pressure the Mubarak government to make democratic reforms to keep the Egyptian people from rising up against their government.

“We need to do the same thing with our other friends, the monarchs to make moves toward greater constitutionalism and greater representation for their people,” Rice said. “[We need to] continue to press Egypt for reforms that are democratic.”

This also includes maintaining a commitment to the people of Iraq and developing a constructive solution to the conflict in Syria.

“It’s a pretty big agenda to handle these challenges in this changing world that’s undergone these shocks,” Rice said. “There are those who ask if we can handle this challenge and still preserve our values.

“I would suggest that we can handle these challenges only if we pursue our values. This is what has made the U.S. exceptional – this belief in free markets and free people and a willingness to try and promote them abroad  and this belief that the world will be more free and prosperous as freedom wins out.”