Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to [Warren Buffett ], that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
I get very concerned when people talk about cutting education budgets.
Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.
The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.
In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.
The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
The dreams of the past - whether it was public TV being rolled into the classroom to teach Spanish, or the film projectors or the videotapes or the computer-aided instruction drill systems - the hopes have been dashed in terms of technology having some big impact. The foundation, I think can play a unique role there. Now, our money is more to the teacher-effectiveness thing, and technology is No. 2, but I'll probably spend more money on the technology things.
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'
