President Obama made a surprise visit to a White House question and answer session with student journalists Thursday, and told his young audience that he was a “slacker” in high school.
“I can tell you guys were high-achieving, Type A folks,” Obama said to the university students Thursday. “Unlike the kind of slacker kid that I was.”
Obama made the remark while outlining his plans for college affordability. Obama said that college credit classes offered in public high schools are one way to cut down college costs. But he also conceded that had such courses existed in his high school days, “slacker kid” Obama wouldn’t have been one of the students signed up for them.
“What we have seen is a number of high school systems partner with community colleges and universities so that they make arrangements — you start to take your college credits in high school,” Obama said. “You have enough credits so that you can graduate in three years, instead of four.”
President Obama has discussed his less rigorous adolescence before, and has admitted both his ambivalence toward academics and drug use, which he identified as his “greatest moral failing” during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, that he turned to drugs and underage drinking so that he “could push questions of who I was out of my mind … blur the edges of my memory.”
“I made some bad decisions … There was a whole stretch of time that I didn’t really apply myself a lot. It wasn’t until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, ‘Man, I wasted a lot of time,'” then-Senator Obama said in 2007 to New Hampshire high schoolers.
Obama also gently chided the press Thursday, complaining that he and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest are sometimes treated unfairly by the press. Still, he said that’s a trait that separates the United States from other countries.
“Sometimes, both Josh and I probably have our disagreements with the press corps, feel picked on, or misunderstood,” Obama said. “But the truth of that matter is … what separates us out, in part, from a lot of other countries, is that we’ve got this incredible free press that pokes and prods and calls into account our leaders.”
And that is how we can make sure leaders are accountable to the people who elect them. And that is how we can make sure you don’t see major abuses of power, and when you do that, in fact, the American people know about it and are able to make change,” Obama said.
“So you guys are going to have a critical role, those who end up following journalism. I hope many of you do,” Obama said.
Of the White House Press Corp., Obama said: “You’ve got some of the best journalists in the country operating here. I normally don’t say nice things about them in front of them … I wanted to make sure to acknowledge the great work that they are doing.”
