WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama is to tell high school students in Washington U.S. success "in the coming years is up to you."
In a back-to-school speech Wednesday at Benjamin Banneker High School, the president will acknowledge students in 2011 "are growing up faster and interacting with the wider world in a way that old folks like me didn't have to," a transcript of Obama's prepared remarks indicated.
"So today, I don't want to be another adult who stands up to lecture you like you're just kids," he says in remarks released Tuesday by the White House. "Because you're not just kids. You're this country's future. Whether we fall behind or race ahead in the coming years is up to you. And I want to talk to you about meeting that responsibility."
Obama will urge those in his audience to be "the best student you can be" by working "as hard as you know how."
In his prepared remarks, the president concedes he "wasn't always the very best student" but recalls taking an ethics class in eighth grade, and says ethics "probably wouldn't have made the list" of his favorite subjects. He says the class made him think about important questions and "that process of discovery" is still part of his thinking.
"Every day, I'm thinking about what those issues mean for us as a nation," he says.
"And down the road, those are the traits that will help you succeed," the president says.
