With society sporting a "brain dead" education system, success may often seem unobtainable. But people can reach it if they learn to speak up for their beliefs and not be afraid to do what they know is right, Joe Clark told an audience at Utah State University Thursday.
It's a lesson that Clark - the controversial educator and inspiration for the movie "Lean on Me" - has learned first-hand.Instead of lamenting his situation when his mother left him and his six younger siblings when he was 17, Clark said he focused on what he could do to make things better.
He supported his family and earned a master's degree. Clark later become principal of New Jersey's Eastside High, where his leadership changed the school from raucous to reputable.
"I went from disgrace to amazing grace," he said.
Speaking with vigor and humor, Clark told audience members (who greeted him with a standing ovation) how they too can rise from "the depths of despair to the perfect cadence of success."
"You've got to got off your rusty-dusty and do something for yourself," he said. "You can't say, `Stove, give me some heat and I'll put wood in tomorrow.' You have to put something in . . . to get something out."
A crucial part of these efforts, Clark said, is to overcome fear. "You have to be willing to stand up for what you believe. No woman or man is free who is afraid to speak the truth as he or she knows it," he said.
"The worst type of cowardice is to know what is right and not do it."
But unfortunately, Clark said, too many American schools today are not places where youths can live up to such convictions, nor do families instill these values in children. An education reform - for both schools and families - is in order, he added.
"I sincerely feel the education system today is brain dead. It's emotionally and spiritually drunk. That's what saddens me the most.
"If there is to be any change, it emanates from the family structure," he said.
A weakened education system means a weakened democracy, standard of excellence and labor force, said Clark, who added that while education is faltering, it's by no means solely the fault of educators.
Teachers cannot be held responsible for inadequately funded schools whose students include increasingly more and more latch-key children, students on the poverty line and those born as crack babies.
This makes the challenge of motivating young people even greater, Clark said, but it can - and must - be done.
"Our nation will be in peril if we do not teach our children to think and analyze for themselves," he said.
If not, they will go through life as ventriloquists' dummies, he said.
One means Clark used in motivating the students in his school, and for which he is well-known, was by packing symbolism into an ordinary baseball bat.
"This bat is a way to prick the conscience of a nation," he said, fingering the wooden item as he walked across the stage. "It's your turn at bat. What are you going to do - strike out or hit a home run?"
So, with his bat-wielding, high-energy focus on youth and education, was Clark depicted accurately by Morgan Freeman in "Lean on Me?"
"They downplayed me in the movie," Clark said. "That's one of the most disdainful things I can think of."