Obama Tells Latin America: ‘We All’ Have To ‘Invest’ in Using More Tech in Education

“The hemisphere will continue to experience the growth that's necessary, I think there are a couple principles we just have to follow, and some of them have already been mentioned so I’ll just speak to them very quickly. The first is our people have to be the best trained in the world. We have to not only educate our children but we have to give our people the capacity to continue to learn throughout their live because the economy is changing and workers have to adapt.

It's going to be very rare where somebody works at one place for 30 years with just one skill. So the investments that all of us have to make in education, not just through primary or secondary schools, but if young people are not going to universities, they can still at least get technical training and advanced degrees. 

And this is where technology can be our friend. We initiated something called 100,000 strong to improve the exchanges between students in Latin America and the United States, and part of what we're doing is starting to figure out how can we use technology to reach more young people, not just the folks who are at the top of the economic pyramid but reach down and access remote areas where suddenly a young person in a small village, if they are linked through the Internet, have access to the entire world. And companies I think can play an important role because public-private partnerships will make these kind of investments more effective."