--- title: Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us | TIME description: TIME's Joe Klein interviews former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education canonical: https://time.com/video/56QVUzIO/ og:title: Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us og:description: TIME's Joe Klein interviews former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education og:url: https://time.com/video/56QVUzIO/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/56QVUzIO/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us twitter:description: TIME's Joe Klein interviews former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/56QVUzIO/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us [Watch (HLS stream): Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/56QVUzIO.m3u8) (20:23)  _Published 2013-09-20. TIME's Joe Klein interviews former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:46 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Hillary Clinton Blames Colin Powell For Email Scandal](/video/HPLjzZs5/) ### Hillary Clinton Blames Colin Powell For Email Scandal [Nancy Gibbs Kicks off the TIME Summit on Higher Education](/video/g4pXViBA/) ### Nancy Gibbs Kicks off the TIME Summit on Higher Education [May 2012 - 10 Questions for Colin Powell](/video/lhTwCBTd/) ### May 2012 - 10 Questions for Colin Powell --- ## Transcript Power. [ LAUGH ] But for those of you who don't, he was the first four star African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was Secretary of State during the Bush Administration. He has written two books, My American Journey, and I'm looking up the name of the [ LAUGH ] second one here. it, it is. It worked for It worked for me. Leadership. [ LAUGH ] And it's about leadership which is really important here. This session could also be called two guys from the outer Burroughs talking about higher ed. General's from the Bronx, I'm from Queens. And I'd like to, I'd like to start off with a story. A few years ago, I was at a dinner that the atlantic counsel had. They were honoring Bono, Bono the you know the great rock musician and humanitarian, and Andrew McMurphy. Mullen. Millen. Mullen. Mullen. Okay. I'll be there in a second. [ LAUGH ] Admiral Mike Mullen. And afterwards Bono wanted to talk to me cuz he knows that I've done a lot reporting in the, in the, in the military world especially down range in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he said you really have to encourage the American military to do more with local agriculture is how you build middle classes. And, and he was very eloquent about this. And I tapped Admiral Mullen on the shoulder, and I said, Admiral, why don't you tell him about pomegranates. And, and then for the next 15 minutes, Admiral Mike Mullen, a navy guy, a blue water navy guy, gave a brilliant disquisition on the replacement value of pomegranates in terms of the poppy crop, how it was the highest paying crop, but because of soil quality and and other factors it could only be planted here. Bono said, what about weed? And, and and Mullen said, well, we could plant it over here and here, and we're trying to encourage, we're giving em seeds. The point is that, like most civilians. Hi Rick, [ LAUGH ] Congratulations. Like most civilians, Bono wasn't aware of the fact that our military is one of the great learning institutions in this society. And just to give you an example, let me ask General Powell about the various higher learning education experiences you've had. Yeah. In my 35 years in the Unites States Army, the army put me through about six years worth of schools. There are very few institutions in American society where you'll make that kind of investment in your leadership. I went to two Army War Colleges, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the National Defense University in Washington D. C.. And the army, when I came back from Vietnam in 1969, they sent me to George Washington University full- time, no other duties, to get a Master of Business Administration. I'm an infantry officer. But they wanted me to have an MBA and they wanted me to have an MBA in this new thing called Data Processing. We had to learn about it and we needed line officers such as myself to get this kind of skill. And what we do in the Army is essentially promote from within. If I need a battalion commander I can't go hire one from Time. I got a grow one from being a second lietunenant to come up to be a leutenant colonel. So we invest mightily in the education of our officers. Whether other point I would make is that as young officer coming in, I spent my first nine or ten years just being a good infantry officer. But at that point of ten years or so, they want you to expand your basic knowledge. They want you to learn about politics. They want you to learn about international relations and alliance relations. And so you're expected to expand yourself. And so you'll find that most senior officers in the Armed Forces of the United States have advanced degrees. A number of them are PhDs. A number of them have been to civilian universities for technical training or just to broaden their background. And the simple reason is the world becomes more complex as you become more senior. And you have to develop the skills necessary to operate in that more complex world. I have to say that the most intellectually rigourous group of people I've I've met in the last 25 years were not the folks in places like Brookings or on the staffs of of members of congress, but the staffs that surrounded David Petreaus at Fort Leavenworth when they were writing the Counterinsurgency Doctrine. But you, General Powell, have gone much farther in terms of higher education than most, in that you have founded a school at CCNY. Why don't you tell us about that? Tell us about the Powell school. Well, we have a former chancellor here who is very instrumental of that Mack Goldstein. And thank you again Mr. Chancellor for what you've done. But some years ago, CCNY, it's a wonderful school up in Harlem, that I graduated from in 1958, they created a small center, and they called it the Powell Center. And when I left the State Department and went to see what was being done in my name up there, I was just enormously excited by what I saw at CCNY. And it's reflective of all the colleges that are within the CUNY system. The student population is about 80 % minority and 50 % of them are immigrants. Not the children of immigrants. They are immigrants. This is the future of our city and this is the future of our country. So I got all caught up in it. And over time, as we expanded the leadership training with these students and as we reached out into the community with service learning and connected academic studies with what's going on in the community of Harlem or elsewhere in our Country. With the help of the chancellor and President Cuico president of CCNY, we created an entire school now that's called the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership. I'm extremely proud of this school. It's roughly 1 / 3 of the population of the school. And we are investing in our kids mightily. But, to pick up on something that was said in the previous panel. CCNY was created in 1847. And its original name was the Free Academy of New York. The Free Academy. And it was open to all. And the hope was that the rich and the poor would come together to this one place. And for the longest part of its history, to include when I went there, it was free. I paid nothing. I didn't even, I think I paid a ten dollar athletic fee one of those years if they caught me to pay it. And why? How could it be free? Because the taxpayers of the city of New York and the great system that was created building on CCNY felt that it was no more important responsibility for a government, and for the people to do, than invest in the future of the city by investing in the education of the young people. And not just those at the top, but those at the bottom. And we take in kids who just come in with a GED. We take in kids who look like losers but they're not. And we educate them and I'm so proud now to have that school named after me and I can spend a lot more time there. What's particularly amusing to me is that I graduated with a 2. 0. [ LAUGH ]. And there are professors rolling in their graves to this day. But I got A's in ROTC and that's what brought me up to 2. 0 and they said fine. [ LAUGH ]. Send him to the Army. We'll never see him again. [ LAUGH ] And I'm back. well, on that on that note, One of the things that the military does really well is turn boys and girls into men and women. They do it by training them. Not just educating, but educating and training. Education is what happens to your head. Training happens to your head, your heart, and your body. What? We have a boy problem in this country right now. Especially, boys who graduate, even boys who graduate from high school and go directly into academic programs are dropping out at record, record numbers. What kind of? You gave a TED Talk a little while ago about the problems involved in educating boys and in, in, particular, could you tell us about that? I visited a school in Brooklyn, Cristo Rey High School, and I talked to the students and then I, played a little game that I always play with kids after spoken them to school and ask for their questions. And when a kid raises his hand, I make him come to the front of the room, stand at attention, feet out at 45 degrees, hands straight down along your side, put your chin up, eyes open, look straight ahead, and I wanna hear your questions loud and strong. And so, the kids are like this. I even do it to kindergarten kids, they love it even more than the adults. [ LAUGH ] But this one. this one high school kid that I did it to, at Cristo Ray, he's standing like that. And the reason I do that, and the reason the Ted talk has gotten a lot of response is that in the military, we have to start out by teaching youngsters structure and discipline. And people think it's a little rough, but we put 'em in ranks, so that we can move them efficiency, but more importantly, so that if one person makes a mistake, the consequences are seen by all. And you realize that you are now part of a team, and you have to do what is expected of you. And this particular Ted video that went out had the kids standing at attention like a robot. And the comments started to come back in. And the first comment that came back in: this is disgraceful, how can you let a General go in there and start telling kids to stand up like that. But he looks so good. You know. And the thing we learned is that you have to put these youngsters in a structure. And we give 'em a drill sergeant, who they immediately hate. And the drill sergeant just starts shouting at them and beating on them. But it's all for a purpose. It's all to put them together as a team. And I'm afraid this not happening in our communities the way it should. We have too many youngsters who are growing up without some structure in their life. And I don't mean disciplinarian kind of things. I don't mean rough structure. Just the structure of a home, the structure of a family, the structure of a good school, the structure of being part of a good team, a good tribe within your neighborhood. And as one of the early panelists said, you know, the education process begins early. And my own view of it is, the education process begins the moment a child in his or her mother arms looks up and realizes: this is my mother, this is the language I have to learn. Shut all the others out. And at that moment, if the child is not exposed to the right things in life. The child is not read to. The child is not taught colors. How to tell time. How to tie your shoe. How to mind your manners. When that child gets to first grade, just like very other child, they'll be totally excited. This is wonderful. But if they haven't been prepared for first grade, by second to third grade they realize I'm behind. I'm behind. And they start to act it out. And if we don't fix it by then, or fix it before they get there, you're on the way to a drop- out kid or a kid that's heading to jail. It's demonstrable. And so the work I do in another part of my life with my wife, the America's Promise Alliance, focuses on making us a nation of graduates by getting into the lives of our youngsters at the very earliest age and teaching them discipline and structure. And children need that. They need to know what the limits are. A child without limits, is, is not a child that's gonna be successful. A child will forever be testing, waiting, where are the limits? And we need to give our children structure. Now I don't want to sound like a drill sergeant myself, but I firmly believe this. And in my new book I wrote a chapter that's called We're Mammals. We have to raise our children just the way a mother lion raises her cubs. With structure and discipline and in a family unit. And in that family unit they pass on a thousand generations of experience, those lions. We have to do the same thing with our chidren. All of our children. And not just those who have well- to- do situations. Yes, I, I think that, that's an important point that you know, the military represents one percent of the population now. I am writing book about one organization of veterans and the, the staff there call civilians the 99 %. And it's not just the poor who need to feel what it's like to be part of something larger than themselves, is it? No, no. And then, one of the standard talks I give when I travel around the country is that every organization, whether it's a Fortune 500 company or a Wall Street company, every organization needs to have a sense of purpose increasingly. Missions and goals are fine. But what are we doing for the society of which we are a part? I have seen some financial companies for example that focus on how do we reduce risk. How do we, how do we achieve our, our quarterly share. How do we do this. How do we do that. What I say to them that's all wonderful, I know it's important for you to do. But have you told the American people why you do it? What's your purpose? What are you doing for the American people? You have to explain to the American people that you allow them to buy homes and get money for schooling of their children. You allow them to get the good things in life, And that's why you exist. Not simply to make a profit or pay out bonuses. And I found this even in the smallest group of human beings, just people in my offices, you know. The people who would come up and clean up behind me at night at the state department. I would stop and talk to them and let them know that their purpose is not just to clean a desk, but to make sure that this office tomorrow looks beautiful to anyone that comes from me from anywhere in the world to visit the Secretary of State. So human beings need to have a purpose, a purpose that is outside of themselves, outside of the organization they are a part of, serving the community that they are a part of. And I think we've lost a little about it, a little bit of that common purpose as a nation. S, you're in a room full of higher educators. What advice, what do you think they can learn from the military? Obviously the military has learned an awful lot from them, because, I mean, this semester I'm at, I'm up at the Kennedy School at Harvard and there are military fellas all over the place. But, what can they learn from the military? How do, how can you, especially with their incoming freshmen and their students who are, many of whom are lost and are coming into an unstructured situation without a sense of personal structure and discipline. What would you, your advice to them be? My advice would be, you have to create a structure, and I've seen programs of, that, that do this. I've seen programs that go into the high schools. Typically in the inner city or, let's call them minority high schools. And rather than just bring one kid into college, college that is unlke anything they have ever been a part of, we get several of the youngsters to apply to the same college, and bring them in as a group so they can reinforce one another. But young people, if they haven't had structure in their life before, or if the structure they have been in is radically different from the structure they're entering in college, I think the leadership of the college has an obligation to do something about that and create tribal networks, create a system that will reinforce their basic skills and let them know they can do it. I've also seen it where it doesn't work. We, in one of the programs we had in the Washington area. We had an inner city girl who was very smart, but coming down from southeast Washington, and we were gonna get her a scholarship to a very upscale school for high school. And we realized that we couldn't do that. She would have failed. It was too, too large a gap, and so we got her a smaller gap to fill with a different school. And so we have to acknowledge the problems that young people might come in, not just academic problems but social problems, the social differences, between where they were and where they're going. And I think this is the responsibility of the teachers, the responsibility of leaders of our colleges and universities, to help youngsters bridge that gap that might exist in their experience. The other question I'd ask is this. You've talked about how the military educates its leaders. And how it's a continuing process. How does the rest of the government stack up in that regard? What could the government learn in terms of training their people from the military. Is it, is, is the military the only place where this is possible? I don't know if it's the only place, but I think it's the best place throughout government. In most government agencies, people will come in at the entry level with basic skills that they acquired in college or in some early level experience. But the departments will seldom invest the kind of money or resources or time needed to get those added skills. In the State Department, when I took over, I realized that a number of our ambassadors going out to the missions all over the world were very skilled with respect to knowledge and experience, but not in terms of leading an organization of 300 or 400 people in a foreign country with 28 different government agencies in the embassy. So we inserted leadership training into our foreign service institute. And I also discovered, this is more related to Joe's question, that our civil service employees, foreign service is one thing, but the civil service employees were simply learning on the job. They were getting no education, no training. And so we instituted a training program for middle- level managers in this civil service to prepare them for senior leadership levels. Now the military is, is somewhat different from the rest of the government. Simple reason that I can't hire from outside. Everybody has to come up the channel. And therefore, if we want to have a an efficient force, a good force, you have to constantly invest in the people who are in the system and not expect people to come from outside the system cuz they're not. Well, we're down to our last minute here any other advice do you have, that you have for these higher educators? Well, yes. Good. Well I've been listening to the, to the early panels discussions and I'm troubled by the financial situation that the universities and college are going through. I'm troubled by what I heard particularly from Dave Borne about how the percentage of state funding that was going to his university has been dropping regularly over time. And I think that's the case throughout our system. To include schools such as CCNY which now has a tuition of roughly $ 3000 a year as with the other CUNY schools. And I'm sorry, I just think that we have no greater obligation than to educate our kids. They're the only thing that we leave behind, for real, that counts. And therefore it seems to me that it's a burden on our political leaders to understand this. And as was said in the previous panel we can afford it. We can afford it, if we're prepared to make the right choices. We can afford it if we can fix this congress, which is totally polarized and is not serving the country very well at all right now. And don't wait for Superman or Superwoman to come along and fix this. It's we the people that have got to start voting these folks out if they're not getting the job done, if they're not able to reach across the aisles. It's very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. And we've been kinda trying to do that in recent years. And I think turning our young men and women into adults and into citizens should be job number one of higher education. Thank you so much general. Thank you. I think you're coming back for more. I'll be right back yeah. Yeah, okay. Great. Now we are gonna, kind of. [ SOUND ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Colin Powell: We Can Fix Education, But Congress Is Failing Us","description":"TIME's Joe Klein interviews former Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/56QVUzIO/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-09-20T14:43:45.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/56QVUzIO.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/56QVUzIO/","duration":"PT20M23S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/56QVUzIO/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```