The Importance of Public Education
Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., discusses the importance of having public universities and colleges for everybody and making them excellent, and this he credits as the main source of progress in North Carolina.
Interview on 2012-05-29 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Well my experience as a student at NC State informed me and broadened my interest in the world. It made me aware of how things work in terms of the economy,
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particularly in agriculture and education and economics, areas where I guess I got an education, a major.
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Through student government it helped me develop skills in developing relationships and partnerships. In the teaching and the readings and so forth I developed knowledge,
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I got interested, and I became inspired. I would also say that I became aware of the importance of higher education.
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When people think about it it’s generally in college that you get these new thoughts. It isn’t just the same old stuff you knew, everybody knew it.
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You’ve discovered new ideas: Well what are they doing over there in China? What’s the effect of certain policies that some people are for?
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What’s the injustice of segregation and racial discrimination? How does a human being develop? What’s going on in his earliest years? Is that important?
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What are you going to do about it? Of course at NC State I formed some of the most important friendships and partnerships that I’ve ever had and that have enabled me to have a great team,
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a great organization, perhaps–some people say–the best political organization in the history of the state thus far. But I think nothing is more important in college,
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in higher education, than becoming inspired to do what’s right, what is good, and that happened to me at NC State and it happened in part because I did take a lot of those liberal arts courses.
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It wasn’t just, you know, what’s the theory, something you work out with math–and that’s critically important–
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but it’s also what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s the effect and how can you do things better, and what does what you believe require you to do and to be,
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and what opportunities do you have and how can you extend those to other people. So I will always be deeply indebted to NC State,
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all the people who created the university originally and built it and continue to support it, and there’s some people that don’t understand
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about public universities and public schools and public early childhood education and support for it.
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We have to educate those people and we have to keep working at it. We’ve made immense progress and we’ve done it in large measure
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because of our commitment to public education. Private institutions are important and I support them pretty strongly,
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but it’s public education for everybody and making it excellent that I think has been the main source of our progress in North Carolina, and we’ve got to continue to do it.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
