Empowering the youth is our responsibility, and the youth will be empowered with more investment on them.

We must act in unison and rising above politics on the question of development of the country and empowerment of the youth to raise them as future leader in every field of our national life.

We cannot keep on carrying burdens of the past and keep ruining our future.

If we remain hostage to our past, then we will go nowhere.

When I was first elected to the Colorado State Board of Education in 2000, we had to carry a big binder filled with hundreds of pages to every meeting. By 2004, the State Board had gone paperless. We even persuaded the less-tech-savvy members to use laptops to pull up their information during meetings.

Education seems to be placing increased emphasis on assessment and tracking, which means parents are terrified that if their kid doesn't exceed their expected learning level at six years old, they are immediately put in the class that ends up working at McDonald's.

I love and collect contemporary art and go to all the art fairs. I love Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. I grew up in Italy and had a humanistic education in philosophy and literature - things I love and appreciate. People are richer and more complex than just their day-to-day professional pursuits might suggest.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.