Remarks by the First Lady at Chinese Immersion School Visit

Yu Ying Public Charter School
Washington, D.C.

1:41 P.M. EST
 
MRS. OBAMA:  (Applause.)  I’m delighted to be here.  I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to take a trip in a couple of weeks to China, and I heard that you all took a very similar trip.  Did everybody here go on the trip?  How many people went to China?  Yes.
 
Well, you guys are going to help me out with my trip because you’re going to prep me.  See, I have all of these wonderful policy people that help me prep, but I figured since you actually visited some of the cities that I’m going to go to that I would get a good sense of what to expect, what you learned, what you liked, what you didn’t like, some of the questions that you think I should ask and be prepared for.
 
Because I do a lot of international travel, and everywhere I go I try to focus on education.  Because one of the things that I want to learn from young people in China is what works for them, what keeps them motivated to keep working hard, studying hard in school.  And I also want to take kids from America with me on those trips.  If they can’t do it physically, I want them to be following what I do.
 
Because what you guys probably learned is that being able to go to another country and learn about other cultures and traditions, that’s a real gift.  Not a lot of kids get to do that, but it’s going to be important as you grow up and you get jobs and you start living in a world that is a very global world.  It’s important to know about other cultures, other traditions.
 
And so that’s why we’re here, because you guys are already ahead of the curve.  And your school is a model for what hopefully more schools in this country will do to expose kids to other countries.  So I’m excited to hear what you have to say.  I’m going to stop talking.  My job is to listen now, okay?  Take it away.