Chelsea Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg

All right, well it is really exciting for me to be here, which is home, here at the JCC. I want to thank Karen and Ronit and always Zach for putting this great group together, and this is a great community. I'm really excited to get a chance to be with all of you, but also welcome my dear friend, Chelsea Clinton, to the JCC. Thank you, Carol. I want to echo your thanks to the JCC and everyone who made this evening possible, as well as everyone from the Churchill Club, and I just am so grateful that Cheryl took time out of her very busy life to talk with me about It's Your World, so thank you, Cheryl. All right, so Chelsea needs no introduction, but I'll give you one anyway. She's the vice chair of the Clinton Foundation. She's her PhD from Oxford in international relations and a master's in public health. She teaches health policy at Columbia. She's really dedicated her life to unlocking human potential, and this book, It's Your World, Get Informed, Get Inspired, Get Going, is testament to that. I know a lot of us, those of us who are old enough, watched her grow up, so you feel like you kind of sort of know her. I will tell you that the real Chelsea Clinton is even more amazing than the one we all admired from afar, so I'm excited to share her with all my friends here tonight. All right, so let's start. Chelsea, you have a little bit going on, right? You've got the Clinton Foundation, you teach, you have a daughter who just turned one. Why would you write a whole book, and why this book? Well, I kept talking to my nieces and nephews. I have 19 nieces and nephews. Yeah, wow, I know. My husband has 10 brothers and sisters, and they're friends and other young people that we know, and I was just continually struck by how curious kids are about the world around us, how much more attuned and attentive I think kids are than often adults give them credit for being to what's happening in their own schools, in our communities, in our world, and I also kept meeting amazing young people who were doing something about issues that they cared about, either bullying in their schools or helping to fight climate change, and I remembered a book that I had read when I was 10 or 11 called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth, and it had a profound impact on me because it treated me seriously. It didn't talk down to me. It wasn't pejorative. It treated me seriously as someone who even though I was just a kid deserved to know it was happening with climate change and pollution, and it empowered me with really practical suggestions of what I could do as a kid in Little Rock, Arkansas to make a difference on the issues that I really cared about, so I went looking for a book like 50 Simple Things today that I could share with my nieces and nephews and other young people to talk about what was happening in the world and what kids were doing and they then could do, and I couldn't find anything like that, so I decided to try to write that. So you divide it into three sections, get informed, get inspired, and get going. I think we have a lot of young folk here who would like to get informed, get inspired, and get going. Talk us through the three sections and how you thought of framing it this way and what those mean to you. So I thought of framing it along get informed, so kind of what is happening with access to education around the world. Here in the United States for almost a century, since 1918, every kid has had the right to free public education. That's not true in a lot of the world. There are many barriers to getting an education around the world. There aren't enough schools. There aren't enough teachers. The schools that are there are often really far away. In many places, it's either illegal or strongly discouraged for a girl to go to school, and so I thought it would be hopefully interesting and certainly informative for kids here to understand why there are lots of reasons that almost 100 million kids aren't in school around the world today, and then get inspired sharing stories of young people who are trying to solve some of those challenges from the United States and in countries where kids aren't in school by standing up against child marriage and helping build schools, helping ensure there are more teachers being trained and being paid to do the important work of teaching, and then get going, kind of giving practical suggestions of what kids can do, working with clubs and schools here to raise money to build a school or help support a teacher or even just raise awareness about the fact that there are still tens of millions of kids not in school around the world. So I think we often take for granted, all of us of all ages, that people know things that we know, and that's generally not true, I found, and so I think raising awareness is also something that kids are uniquely positioned to do. Adults want to listen to you, so I think that's something that any kid can do, and so they're really practical suggestions at the end of each chapter, some of which take time, some of which do take money, but all of which just can take a little bit of energy and can really ensure that you make a difference. I think that's a great message. Everyone here ready? Raise your voice. All the kids, raise your hand. You're going to raise your voice? Okay, good. So it won't shock you that I would like to start with your chapter on gender equality. Chelsea has been an early and great friend to me as I went down the path towards Lean In. You were one of the first people I told I was thinking of writing a book, and you was incredibly supportive, which I'm still grateful for. But you opened with stories from your childhood, and they're common stories. I did an event here at the JCC about them, but in teachers telling you not to speak up, telling you not to raise your voice, actually letting boys do things in your classroom that you didn't like, girls told to be ladylike. And you say now that you proudly call yourself a feminist, even though you don't think actions, you don't think the words matter, you think the actions matter. How do you think we help the communities understand that we still have these gender biases? How did you bring those stories to life here on your own, and what do you think we need to do about it? I think it's important that we recognize in no country on earth do girls and women have the same rights and opportunities that men and boys do. Those barriers look different in different countries. One of the things that I have found kids react to most strongly now that I've been talking about It's Your World over the last couple of weeks is the fact that there are 750 million women around the world who were married before the age of 18, and that one out of nine people on earth who will be married this year will be a girl under the age of 18. And that there are states in the United States, in our country, where you can legally be married under 18, including in Massachusetts, where a girl can get married at 12 if a court and her parents say it's okay. I had no idea that she herself has no agency. She herself has no say. And so I think it's important when we have this conversation, particularly as it relates to young people, that we talk about the whole scope of challenges that girls face around the world, but also here in the United States. And the story that Cheryl's talking about really is my first memory of being aware that I was a girl. I was in first grade. We were at school late because it was a PTA meeting, and my mom was at the PTA meeting in the cafeteria, and I was kind of in the classroom that had been given over for all the kids to play and while we waited for our parents. And this little boy was just being really nasty to me. I call him John in the book because I hope he's turned out to be a really lovely person now, and I don't want an enterprising reporter to track him down and say, like, why were you a bully, you know, 30 years ago? Good thinking. So I changed his name in the hopes that he's turned out lovely, but he was not lovely almost 30 years ago. And he just kept harassing me and harassing me, and at one point he pushed me down and he sat on me. And I asked him nicely to get off, and he just wouldn't get off. And finally, I kind of, like, I shoved him off so I could stand up, and the teacher walked over to me and said, you know, that was not very ladylike behavior. And I was so taken aback, and I, and it was such a sort of crisis, you know, for a six-year-old, because I wanted to be polite, and I felt like I had tried to be polite, and that hadn't worked, but I also knew that I had to defend myself, and that it was never okay for someone to sit on me. I mean, I knew that, for example. And I am so grateful that I knew that I could talk to my parents about that, and that I could go home and ask questions about, you know, why that had happened, and what did they think, and had I done something wrong? And I think that we have to create safe spaces for girls to have those conversations around the world. I think that is something that is true regardless of the challenges that girls face, and those of us who have platforms, literally, like we have a platform, but as so many of us have platforms in our own families, in schools, in our work, have to create environments where that's never okay. And I'm just so grateful that I had parents who created that environment for me, and set that sort of moral compass, because that helped protect me from when I experienced, as I went on to later experience, other examples of men, but also some women who were kind of stigmatizing at best, and at other times sort of, you know, very much trying to get me to lean back, not lean in. So since we're in Silicon Valley, and you've been very focused on this, you've done a lot, you talk about in the book, women in computer science, women in technology. So as much as we need women and girls to have equal voice and equal rights, we have a crisis in technology, which is that the numbers are going the other way as technology becomes more important. I know you feel strongly about this. Why do you think we need more women in technology and computer science, and what do you think is our path to get there? Well, I don't think we're going to live in the future that any of us want to live in, if we continue to exclude effectively half of our potential, and our promise. I mean, I think that's pretty self-evident. And I think, you know, what companies are doing in the Valley, Facebook, Google, recognizing that it's in your interest to also ensure that there are more women in the pipeline, is such a strong testament to that. And what China is doing from a state government perspective, looking to engage more young women in the STEM fields, is a recognition that it's in their national interest to ensure that women, as men, are continuing to go into these fields, continuing to innovate and create. And I think about, kind of, this challenge has been in the arc of my own life, as I talk about in the book. In 1987, Santa Claus gave me a Commodore computer for Christmas. I wish I still had it. One sold at auction recently for $18,000. But it definitely did not make the trip. It's hard to go down a chimney with that. I mean, that was a lovely, it was impressive. I don't think it snowed that year, so it was easier. And, you know, in the mid-1980s, women were a third of computer science graduates in our country. And when I graduated from Stanford, just down the road, in 2001, women were about 1 in 4. A little bit less, but about 1 in 4. And now we're less than 1 in 5. And so even though the denominator continues to grow, as more community colleges, four-year colleges, universities, invest in building capacity for students to take and major in computer science, fewer and fewer women are participating. And we know that this is a real challenge that starts really around the age that so many of you are, in the age that It's Your World hopes kids who read it will be, and really in middle school. And I know Cheryl knows this research as well, and even better than I do, that kind of from male and female teachers calling on girls less in math and science classes, even when girls raise their hands at the same rates, to the cognitive science that says around fourth grade, girls start imposing themselves in the stories that they see or they hear, rather than imagining their own story. So if you're seeing yourself only kind of as a princess, or only as defined as your relationship to your father, or to your brother, or to someone that you work for, it's hard to continue to imagine yourself as the hero of your own story, or to continue to imagine yourself as a real innovator, which is what so much of technology is fundamentally about. So I think the good news is that we're now aware of a lot of how we wound up here, but now we need pretty collective and complementary efforts from the private sector, kind of from the government, from school districts, from places like the JCC, who are engaged in kids' lives, or who kind of set the rules that we all live by to ensure that more little girls want to grow up and be both Sheryl and Mark Zuckerberg. So global poverty, something you and I have spent a lot of time talking about, something you've cared about very passionately. The World Bank sets global poverty at $1.25 a day, and one in six people on the world live under that level. You talked about learning about, in the book you talk about learning about this when you were 15 years old, on a trip to India and Pakistan. I'd love for you to share that story and share what you think kids so far away can do about people that are really at that kind of subsistence level. Well, what I share in the book is that when I was 15, I went on a trip to Southeast Asia with my mom. And what struck me first were actually seeing so many kids and then realizing the reason I was so surprised to see so many kids is because they weren't in school, and that we saw kids everywhere. Kids begging on streets, kids working in fields, kids clearly walking to and from working in factories. And that was so shocking to me and sobering to me because I got to go to school. And so that's one of the reasons why I first got really interested in kind of this question of access to education around the world, and one of the reasons why I included a whole chapter about education in my book. It also was the first time I'd ever seen a concentrated urban poverty. Growing up in parts of the Mississippi Delta and parts of the state where there were still people who lived in homes that had dirt floors, where people still were very much subsistence farmers. I'd never seen anything like a slum, though, until I was in Southeast Asia. And seeing kind of areas where more than a million people lived in a place smaller than Palo Alto was really deeply shocking. And I think it should always be deeply shocking. I think we should always be concerned if we ever become inert and desensitized to people who live their whole lives sort of one square meter of space. And yet we know that people sort of live and are trapped in poverty, again, because of many reasons. And a big one for both people living in slum environments and also people who continue to live in rural poverty around the world, access to clean, safe water is one of them. I talk about water a lot throughout It's Your World because it's really important. You know, if someone doesn't have access to clean water in an easy way, you know, often women spend two to three hours a day getting water for their families. If they don't spend that time and they and their kids drink bad water, their kids often get sick. And so that's time they're not in school, time they're not learning, time that parents can't be working because they have to stay home and take care of their kids. So some of the programs that I talk about that I think are really easy ways for kids to get involved are programs like Charity Water or Living Water International or Water.org that have different ways, working with local communities around the world, building water systems that make sense for those communities because you can't just build a well anywhere and hope that it'll be safe and that it will have enough water. And I highlight a young girl named Maddie who's from Missouri in the book who now has had a series of water walks, each of which is 3.71 miles because that's the average distance that a woman in India has to walk every day to get clean, safe water for her family. And although some well systems are really expensive in the tens of thousands of dollars, many can be built for the hundreds of dollars. And so I think it's a way that whether it's through Girl Scouts or through a school where kids can really get together and raise money to build a well that can have a profound and lasting impact not only for kids today but kids in the future somewhere far away but that I think we all should feel connected to. Such a great point. So we have a lot of educators in this audience. My children attended preschool here at the JCC. I know there are a lot of teachers here. You talk a lot about education and how every child in the book has the right to education but we're not delivering on that obligation. What do you think this audience can do to help children in the United States and around the world get the education that they deserve, the kind of education that's provided to children who can come here? Well I would say first I think it's really important that kids be engaged in your own education. I mean I say in the book one of the reasons I don't talk about education very much in this country is because every kid here has the right to free public education and again that's not true for every kid around the world. But also because I think that kids here and your parents know more about what the right answer is for your education than I do certainly. I mean I already have very strong feelings about my daughter's education and she just turned one and I should be more worried about whether she's going to hit her head if she tries to learn to walk. But on a serious point I think that oh oh is that me being played back to myself? That's a bit eerie, kind of remarkable. I think though I think there I have two answers to this question. The first is increasingly there are efforts to enable peer-to-peer teacher training around the world because although there's so much of a focus on the need to build more schools and that's hugely important, we need twice as many schools as we have across the whole United States probably to ensure that every child can get into and stay in school. But we need at least four million more teachers around the world and so there are a number of still nascent but exciting programs to allow and enable teachers in this country to help mentor teachers around the world and so that's something I hope that teachers will be interested in and and take part in and that's true for early childhood as well as through high school. And then the second is we do need more schools and so I talk about a couple of programs and it's your world building tomorrow that focuses on building schools predominantly in Uganda but also throughout East Africa and then Pencils of Promise that focuses on building schools in Laos and Cambodia and parts of Central and South America and enables people to also even just build part of a school so that groups of kids or classrooms or again Girl Scout troops can raise you know a hundred dollars to help build a classroom or to help ensure that there are books in the classroom because yes they're still largely using books and not technology. So again I think there's so many ways to engage and this is an area where there are meaningful ways for teachers to engage that are unique but potentially really powerful. So this audience is also filled with parents and you are a new parent of your now one-year-old daughter and you talk in the book a lot about the influence not just your mother had on you but your grandmothers and I'd love to hear you to share with the audience you know not just how influenced you but how you influenced them. There's a great story in here about your convincing your father's mother to stop smoking. Yes. And there may be things hopefully no one's smoking my pediatrician sister would like me to say but there may be things that children here would like to convince their parents or grandparents to do. So how are you that persuasive with your parents or grandparents? So my grandmother Ginger who Cheryl's referring to who she passed away when I was 13 so I never got to know her as an adult whereas my mom's mom my grandma Dorothy passed away a few years ago and so I was blessed to know her as a kid and then as an adult and I still miss her fiercely and she remains a major influence in my life. My grandmother Ginger asked me what I wanted for my eighth birthday and I had just read the whole Ramona Quimby series by Beverly Cleary and in one of the books Ramona goes on a campaign to get her father to quit smoking and she makes these signs that say no smoking because she couldn't fit no smoking on one line and I remembered that so so clearly as I was thinking about writing this book and I threatened my grandmother like with an all-out campaign like I'm gonna put up signs I'm gonna take away all your ashtrays so I'd like to think that she did it because it's what I asked for for my birthday but definitely the threatened punitive measures may have been part of it too oh because I was also like I'm not gonna come here anymore I was it was kind of remarkable we're also kind of terrifying when I think about my not quite eight-year-old self but sure enough she quit smoking and it wound up being really a lot of fun because we spent so much time together to distract her from when she was smoking so we cooked and baked together a lot so I have really wonderful memories from that time because she was so determined to actually quit and to fast forward she was later diagnosed with breast cancer that quickly metastasized throughout her body and her doctor said you know we don't know how much extra time she had because she quit smoking but she probably had at least a little extra time because she had stopped smoking and that was such a better gift than I had ever imagined when I asked for her to quit smoking for my eighth birthday and my grandmother Dorothy was just such a remarkable person partly because she had had a life that I couldn't even imagine and she had lived her life in such a way so that her granddaughter could have never imagined her life she was abandoned by her parents twice before the age of eight when she was eight she was put on a train from Chicago to Southern California with her then two-year-old sister by themselves almost two days to get there at that time and she lived with her then grandparents who right before her 14th birthday kicked her out of the house because they said that she was old enough to support herself and she got a job working as a maid in what she called a mother's helper basically a nanny for a family that had three young children and she woke up really early every morning and she did her cleaning work and all the laundry and then she went to school which was her high school was five miles away she had to run to school and she went to school and then she came back and then she helped take care of the three little kids helped bathe them and put them to bed and she later like got herself a typing job and put herself through secretarial school and one day a man walked in asking for directions and that was my grandfather and then she helped him with his small drapery business in Chicago and although she had no intimate experience in her own life of love or of a family environment sort of based on and centered on love and nurturing she created that environment from my mother and my uncles which I just think is so remarkable and she had this adage that has become this mantra in my family as Cheryl knows that life is not about what happens to you it's about what you do with what happens to you and her life was a real testament to that and she was born in our country before women had the right to vote and she lived long enough to vote for her daughter for president so I think that's a pretty extraordinary story and so I think about my grandmother every day and what I can and should be doing to try to live up to her example and I talk to my daughter about her great grandmother because it's really important to me that she knows how lucky she is to be her grandmother's great granddaughter yay that was so great um so we're gonna do a lightning round quick answers okay ready all really really easy questions okay dc or new york new york stanford or columbia stanford good answer play into the crowd socks or buddy oh that's hard that oh like that I can't choose I have to say socks I knew socks better but but he was a really special dog pampers or huggies oh pampers crayons or play-doh well neither yet horton here's a who or the places you'll go horton here's a who charlotte's web or charlotte bronte charlotte's web chicken or ribs coffee or tea coffee mountains or beach mountains late night or early mornings both unbreakable kimmy schmidt or orange is the new black orange is the new black private sector or ngo both food aid or cash aid to countries in crisis cash aid to countries in crisis last book you read oh what was the last book I read that's a really I'm trying to think of a non-parenting non well a lot of the actual answer to this is where is the green sheep which is where I put my daughter to sleep last night I guess that is the honest answer it's a good favorite tv show turn ryan adams or taylor swift ryan adams john oliver or trevor trevor noah john oliver bagel or bialy is a very big question this crowd um pick carefully I'm gluten-free bagel I don't think I've ever had if you were gonna have but if but if there isn't really send it my way game of thrones or veep game of thrones yankees or mets next first thing you do in the morning first thing put on my glasses last thing you do at night um say good night to my husband best piece of advice you were ever given life's not about what happens to you it's about what you do with what happens to you and this is from my son who are you voting for for president definitely my mom thank you very much all right we are going to uh the remarkable chelsea clinton and take questions and we'll request that the questions are you know kind of tight and kind of have questions to them just so everyone gets a chance how old were you when you started um supporting equal rights how old was I when I started supporting equal rights well as soon as I found out that we didn't have equal rights so I guess when I was six is the honest answer how about here and then there is that all right yeah maya I know internationally schools and education are a big problem but I know in some places in the U.S. public schools are are not as good as they could be so what do you think about that and what do you want to do about it so I think that is a very real question and I'll give you um an example when my mom ran for senate in 2000 this is one of those sort of improbably true stories she was campaigning in upstate new york and a teacher said to her can I show you what my biggest challenge is my mom said well of course and she opened the science textbook that she was still using in 2000 and it said one day we'll send a man to the moon right which we did in 1969 so oh wow yeah oh wow so I think oftentimes uh this the the conversation about education in this country in very unhelpful ways gets siloed into conversation sort of just about teachers or just about technology or just about um kind of the aesthetic of schools or just about etc but it's so different that I think the real question maya if this is something that you really care about you should think about what the issues are in the school district where you live and what you think are causing those issues so is it that you don't think teachers are well enough trained is it you think that they're not teaching you what you want and need to know for the 21st century do not have enough physical education that's actually a big deal in our country now fewer than 10 percent of American kids have daily PE class in public schools across our country which means kids are less likely to pay attention in class less likely to retain and to learn what's happening so thank you for asking your question um but I on this one have to throw it back to you and say kind of figure out what the issues are in the districts that you care about or where you're going to school and then talk to your parents about what you want to do about them so hi um I just want to talk for example what maya just said it kind of shows how intelligent the kids are and how involved they are here in silicon valley I can only talk because this is where I live but um how do you tell them I know they've got facebook pages for like play for equal pay right which was shared um a lot thank you to lean in um that my daughter has what would you recommend to kids that may have facebook pages or done gofundmes or whatever to kind of get more um eyes on their causes I think Cheryl's probably the person to better answer that than I can candidly um so I'll defer to her and I would be interested to hear what she has to say on this I think um one of the challenges certainly when I had was talking to the kids that I highlight in the book and one of the things that we didn't talk about before is that um the kids that I highlight in the book some of them I knew before I started the book some of them were part of the inspiration for me writing the book some of them I um kind of came to know of through organizations that I really respect I just saw my friend Cassie over there who works with partners in health some of them were kids who recommended each other some of them were kids who were like you know I know this person kind of through my social media or I know this person because we both kind of won um recognition from the national girl scouts um on this issue and so I think um I would say that I would look at sort of what those kids have done who have big social media presence or kind of have lots of eyes on their website I write about um this young woman Haley from Arizona who when she was seven decided to become the family chef to help um her father fight his diabetes and she started um then helping her friends and then she built an online kind of kids cooking platform and now she does all the kids meals for Hyatt hotels um and you can she's kept all the history on her website so that might be an interesting um kind of look back in history of kind of how she did what she did to gain more and more traction um because she has tens of thousands of kids looking at her website every every month for recipes um but for the Facebook question I'll be curious what Cheryl has to say. You know it's pretty an interesting time when you think about going back even 10 years ago if you were a kid or most adults you couldn't publish anything to anyone right there was no ability to self-publish or have voice so what Facebook does along with the rest of social media is gives and gives anyone access to publish it's also pretty crowded out there right so I think you know the best practices are pictures are really important not just words they really tell stories in ways people can can understand um short succinct informative posts and talking to your friends about it the same way we always did but doing it with social media and in person. And I think I mean one of the things and Cheryl just sparked another um thought for me I mean one of the things that I worked really hard um for with It's Your World was that it would sound like I was talking to someone right that it would that reading it would sound like I was having a conversation with one of my nieces or nephews um in a way that would be accessible to kids but also have real integrity to the issues um because I think kids have a really good um kind of monitor for what's authentic and what's not authentic and I think that's as true sort of on the written page as it would be on a Facebook post I think that's important too yeah in the back yeah who's the mic I think we have a great yes um thank you so much for coming um so how did you decide what you wanted to be when you grow up and what's your favorite part of the job so when I was how old are you I'm 13 so when I was your age what's your name Sarah Sarah so when I was your age Sarah I wanted to be a doctor I've always been really interested in in medicine in kind of what I came to understand um as as health more broadly um but as I got older and when I was at Stanford I realized I was more interested in public health and sort of the systems um and the the determinants whether in our environment or our health care system whether in hospitals or clinics or what doctors are taught or not taught um and how that related to how healthy individuals are but also how healthy whole societies are um so I had a real evolution from kind of being interested just in in medicine to being interested in public health and then being interested in sort of the larger systems around health um and my favorite part of my job is continuing to learn kind of all the amazing things that people are doing um in public health or in this is amazing sorry I've just never I've never I've never had an experience like this you were all here for my first bean um and and so my favorite my favorite part of the work that I do now um is is meeting like really smart energetic people who are 13 or 30 or 90 who are interested in the same types of challenges I'm interested in and trying to solve them together in a way that's more effective and can be done more quickly and ideally more cheaply we're gonna have to go here yeah we have to take that one hi my name is Hamilton uh and I went to school in Palo Alto and I'm in New York right now uh first of all thank you so much for being here and talking with us but uh my question was just uh when you're encountered by uh bullying or you know adverse treatment how was the mature way to make it stop but also you know do the right thing well thank you Hamilton um for your question I think it's a really important one uh for all of us of any age um I have found as someone who has been on the receiving end of a fair bit of bullying in my life that I know now thankfully can recognize that it's always about the bully it's never about me but it's always about the bully and I think that's a really important place to start from um I also recognize that now as a 35 year old I'm much more able to disentangle myself um or if need be respond hopefully gracefully always calmly um to whatever I'm on the receiving end of but I don't think it's it's fair for us to expect other people who haven't been inundated with bullying in the way that I have been in my life to have those same responses and I think it's probably not safe always for us to expect kids to do that so as I write about in It's Your World I think it's important for those of us who see bullying if we're kind of older um and can do something about it to do something about it or to get help you know there's no shame in asking for help you know none of us can solve every problem on our own and hopefully none of us should ever feel or be alone so I think it's important that we ask for help for people that we know who can really help us solve whatever that challenge is so if we see bullying ask a teacher or ask our parents or ask another trusted adult and and don't wait um because no one's going to fault you for asking for help thank you for being here today what two lovely examples you are one of my favorite quotes be the change you wish to see in the world so I'm just inspired to see all the young people as an American government high school teacher I would love for you to share how much do you love the constitution and how important is it for young people to really know and really know and be committed to it um well thank you for being a teacher and thank you for teaching American government because you are at the crux of what I kind of was was talking about earlier um and that I don't think often we understand enough in our country for adults and kids which is what level of government do we need to try to persuade to help make a difference on an issue that we care about I mean I have so many kind of memories as I think about this where people would come up to me um kind of you know all of a couple of years ago when this was still an issue in our country and say like why can't President Obama just make gay marriage legal I'd say well because marriage is a state-by-state um authority in our country right the president can't really just make that happen or people would come up um to me on it's the great thing about riding the subway in New York City is that like I I understand sort of what's in the zeitgeist because people come up and talk to me a lot or people come up to me and say you know I really think President Obama needs to do more on recycling I would say like I bet that he does recycle at the White House like I don't know that right but I bet I bet that he and Mrs. Obama are probably like pretty good about separating out their trash but recycling happens at the local level so if you really feel that way like you need to write to New York so I think what you're doing is so important I think the Constitution is tremendously important I wish I could talk to our founders about maybe being a little more precise I mean any document that gets written effectively in three weeks um clearly is going to have some challenges and that the Bill of Rights was written um in even a shorter period of time before like semi-automatic weapons for example yeah or or back before we actually had a national military so we did rely on you know well-ordered militia you know I think it's important for those of us who really care about this to not gloss over the history I mean we have to be cognizant of the history um so I think it's it's important um for each of us to make up our own minds about kind of why what we think of the Constitution I guess kind of what parts we believe are fundamental to not only our country's past but the country that we want to continue to live in and what parts would we want to change and even amend and I think that's something that all of us have to answer for ourselves whoever has the mic hi um my question to you is um girls feeling in fear starts at home right because their parents are more protective of girls than there are of boys and when they want to try something new they say oh no that's for guys that's a man's job you have a daughter of your own what will you show your daughter that's like try to teach her different what's your opinion on that well I question I want my daughter to do and be whatever she wants to be um I also think it's my responsibility as her parent to help her be able to make um responsible and safe choices I think that's equally true if Mark and I are so to have a son at some point um so I think what's most important is ensuring at least in our house that our children are receiving the same messages and the same messaging um from their mother and their father um and I think we just have to continue to hold ourselves accountable to that if anything um we might over correct not under correct um I have to it has to be okay if my daughter really just like wants to grow up and only wear pink dresses like that's going to be fine um hi thank you so much for coming today um so you've already accomplished so much but where do you see yourself in 10 years you know I don't I don't know and I don't know because I honestly don't think of my life that way and I've never thought of my life that way I mean I have friends who have sort of 10-year plans I mean I have friends who have 20-year plans I am a real planner um but I plan on shorter increments of time so I can tell you what um Mark and I hope to accomplish for our family over the next couple of years because very much now being a mom um my daughter's the most important part of my life by far Cheryl and I were talking earlier I don't really know what I did before I became a mom I mean I know what I did because I can look back and like see all that I did but you had so much free time all of a sudden oh I just feel like everything else that I did before well important um this is just a whole other universe I know every every parent in the audience can understand so when I look forward to the next few years we hope to have more children um I want to see how it's your world goes um I want to see uh kind of whether or not it would make sense to do something else as a follow-up to this or not um at the Clinton Foundation I continue to be really excited about all the data-driven work we're doing around girls and women so I want to keep doing that um with the Clinton Health Access Initiative which is our kind of major global health effort we're doing more and more on women and girls health so I hope that we can say you know in a measurable sense where we've helped have an impact on helping more mothers stay alive and more babies stay alive and then go on to lead healthy lives so there are specific things that I I want to do um but kind of first and foremost I want my daughter to be proud to be my daughter and to know that she's loved and that she's protected and healthy and happy and I hope that we can give her younger siblings um so my question was um what are your thoughts on the higher education system specifically with everyone everyone wanting to go to a four-year college but not being able to afford it um I think that's a great question uh you know after World War II um about eight eight percent-ish of Americans went to college you know last year um more than half of Americans of college age were in some form of higher education so if we look at changes in the last few generations uh we would be hard-pressed after kind of thinking about everything um related to the internet and social media to point to kind of a bigger shift than the entrance of many more Americans into the higher education system and I don't I don't know what the answer to your question is I think we're asking those questions now because clearly people think they're not getting a return on investment for their education and I think also because there's so many more people in school now than their parents or grandparents were in school so it's not only kind of the financial question but I think it's also a psychological question because so many people now are having just fundamentally different experiences and experiences that they may or may not be able to see have greater results in higher incomes or kind of greater life satisfaction and happiness than their parents and grandparents did but again I think this is a question that each of us has to answer for ourselves you know and that every family has to answer for itself so I'm wary of kind of coming up with kind of macro suggestions because I often find particularly when it relates to higher education that people making those suggestions are always talking about someone else's children so I think that there are appropriate questions to be asking kind of at a national and a state policy level but again I think this is an area where every person has to make what we think are the right choices for ourselves I think we're going to have time for about two more questions so yeah so you've been talking a lot about the struggles people face all over the world how do you stay optimistic through all that oh I'm very optimistic I'm very optimistic for a couple of reasons first and total confession I just don't find cynicism very useful I mean it's just not very productive like that no no one ever happened no no one ever created anything because they were a cynic no one ever changed anything because they were a cynic and I generally find cynicism to be kind of the preserve of people who want to protect the status quo and I don't want to be with the people that want to protect the status quo so I'm just I think I'm just naturally not cynical also I'm not cynical because for all the places in the world where we haven't made progress there are even more places where we have made progress so 15 years ago there were more than 200 million kids not in school so there are still more than 100 million kids not in school and that's tragic 100 million that was a lot less than 200 million but we now know a lot about what works we just need to be doing more of what works around the world and I believe that we can get there all right someone gets the last question whoever has the mic anyone have a mic yeah right there um so we've all been informed I think through the education that we get and you've just inspired all of us but how can 15 year old girls or any middle school or high school age students get going now I think that's a great question I think it depends on what you care about I mean I think we all care about something I mean I said this briefly earlier so often people ask me what do you think kids should care about and I always say we should ask kids they will tell you what they care about um so I think you have to figure out what you care most about kind of whether that is something that makes you angry or something that inspires you or maybe both and then figure out what you can do because I think all of us really can do something so whether that's raising awareness or donating time or raising money you can do whatever feels right to you to make a difference in whatever you care about and I hope that my book helps you do that so um as part of I think I was trying to think of the best way we could thank Chelsea for coming and I think the best way we can do that is if everyone takes a minute and think about one area you care about something you want to do and then maybe you already have an idea of something you want to do but if not this book great ideas the end of every chapter and but let's all this is I think our best way of thinking right everyone take a minute especially the kids here think about an area you care about make yourself a quiet little pledge to do something everyone um again I'm so glad I got to share my friend with my community and I hope you all are as inspired by this amazing woman as I am thank you Chelsea