And now, a few words with the president ... President Obama recently talked with Scholastic at the White House about 9/11, the challenges facing young people today--and why he'd like to have dinner with Ben Franklin.

• Author: Schroeder, Jacob
• Position: NATIONAL - Interview

SCHOLASTIC: Thank you for sitting down with us today.

OBAMA: Thank you for having me.

SCHOLASTIC: Mr. President, what would you say to students and families struggling in this economy?

OBAMA: The economy has gone through a very difficult time. And we've gone through times like this before, where a lot of people got laid off from work. We had a big economic crisis. It's getting better, but not as fast as we'd like. And I think what I would tell young people and their parents is that we're going to do everything we can to try to provide assistance to people so they don't lose their homes. We're going to do everything we can to try to start new businesses and create new opportunities for people to be able to get the jobs of the future.

This is why it's so important to really focus on being able to go to college and get a degree: Most of the jobs these days are going to be jobs where you've got to have a good education. You've got to have good math skills. You have to have good science skills. You have to have good communication and writing skills.

SCHOLASTIC: What are the greatest challenges facing young people today?

OBAMA: I think that right now, the biggest challenge facing the country is the economic challenge. As I said before, the economy has changed. It used to be that you didn't really need an education to get a good job; you just had to be willing to work hard. Now, you've got to have a good education.

Another big challenge [this] generation is going to face is the environmental challenge. Although we've made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there are some big challenges around climate change. The temperature of the planet is getting warmer because of the pollution we're sending up into the air, the carbon that we're releasing--that's causing changing weather patterns. Places like Florida may be more vulnerable to hurricanes. In other areas, we've seen more drought. It's affecting people all around the world. And so we've got to make sure [the young] generation finds better ways to use energy more efficiently so we're not sending out as much pollution in the air. And that's going to be something that we're really going to have to focus on.

SCHOLASTIC: Ten years later, how has 9/11 changed our country?

OBAMA: It was a moment where we saw that there were people in other countries--a very, very small group of people--who had very terrible ideas and who were willing to kill...