Dear schoolfolk!
Pupils and teachers!

This wonderful Estonian summer is drawing to an end, and once more the Estonian children are going to open their textbooks. Not in order to observe a tradition, not to follow a fashion, but in order to recognise one day: I am wiser than my teacher, wiser than my mother and father, and I know how to make a better life for all of us.

This should be your goal, my dear pupils, because only your aspiration towards this goal can give us hope for a better future, better tomorrow for our shared home country. You are learning in the name of the future, in the name of Estonia's future.

Every successful essay, every solved mathematical equation is a small piece of Estonia's tomorrow. Today, it is your task to gather these small pieces - these particles - into a whole during your school years, so that one day you will have enough skills and resolve to take our country into your care. This day of the future is nearer than you can imagine today. Actually the future is already here in our midst today; it may not yet be clearly visible, but to a keen observer - like you, I hope - it can not go unnoticed.

Recently, I asked what could be the Estonian Nokia. The question launched a downpour of wisecracks in our media, but yielded no other result. Now, my conviction that the creator of the Estonian Nokia is still sitting in a classroom is becoming stronger every day. What can we conclude from this?

First, we do not know whether this classroom is situated in Tallinn or in Narva, in Mõniste or in Palamuse. Thus, the Estonian school should enable the talented students to surface, whether they live in the capital or in a solitary forest farm.

Secondly, the government's care for education is a precondition to the birth of the Estonian Nokia. And also to the continuity of the Estonian state as a whole. Good education is in the long run comparable to strong defence capability. A functioning school network and efficient defence forces are of the same strategic value. Here, I would like to repeat my appeal to the Estonian businessmen and companies to support the Estonian school, as this would mean benefit to both sides.

Dear schoolfolk! Today, on the first day of school, I would like you to consider two things.

First, it is important that you try to understand connections between things as early as possible. Compare. Look for analogies. In the world, everything is connected. An isolated fact is boring and bleak. In connection with other things, it will be much easier to remember. And you will get a clearer idea of the world as a whole.

Dear teachers, please shape this sense of wholeness in our children from the start, from their very first day at school. Thus you will cultivate their ability of systematic thinking, their joy of discovering the whole, of discovering the world. We can not permit superficiality or simplifications. These would set the focus on prompt and easy profit and suffocate in us both Andres and Pearu. From school, everyone should be able to take with him love and sense of eternity.

To you, dear children, I would like to say that as pupils, you are already co-responsible for you own development.

This also means preparing yourself for hardships and troubles. Life is not a delightful garden of flowers. In life, there are also disappointments and failures.

But it is important that after a failure, you should contemplate the reasons for the failure, and seek what you yourselves could do otherwise, and do better. There will always be a new morning.

Today, it is the first morning of a new school year.

Today, I wished a good way to school to my children and grandchildren. I meant both safe traffic between home and school and the way to education, which today starts for every one of you, for every one of us, and has not yet ended for me either.

May all students, young and older, have a good way to school!

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