Condoleezza Rice talks to Phila. students

When Condoleezza Rice was 3, she could read music before she could read words.

"It was always clear in my mind that I was going to be a great concert musician," the former secretary of state told students yesterday at Bodine High School for International Affairs in North Philadelphia. "I studied and worked hard at piano."

But as a sophomore at the Aspen Institute, surrounded by music proteges, Rice had a "crisis of confidence."

"I met 12-year-olds who could play from sight everything it took me all year to learn. All of a sudden, I thought, I may end up playing piano bar someplace, or maybe I'd get to play at Nordstrom's ... but the one thing I'm not going to do is play Carnegie Hall."

Before long, Rice found her true passion: Russia.

Rice's journey, from a young girl in the segregated South to one of the most powerful women in the world, was at the heart of her talk yesterday afternoon during a schoolwide assembly at Bodine.

Rice credited her parents, both educators, and her grandfather, who "managed to be college-educated even though he was a sharecropper's son," with instilling in her the power of education.

"What they valued about education was not that it was a good way to get a job," Rice said. "It is a chance to find out who you are, and make yourself into something you might never ever have been without an education.

"I recognize a little bit of that in you," Rice told the students, some of whom had traveled abroad and speak multiple languages, "that you are beginning to see the world as your platform."

Bodine, on Fourth Street south of Girard Avenue, is a small magnet school operated by the Philadelphia School District and co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council. The curriculum focuses on global issues and foreign language studies.

Rice's visit was part of an event to begin the 60th anniversary celebration of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. She spoke there last night on national security and global affairs.

"I know that the United States of America is not always popular," Rice told the council. "Frankly, that's not a standard that we should hold ourselves to. . . . It is very often the case that it is only the United States of America that will do something hard. . . . What is more, the United States is respectful. After all, I don't see that many people trying to emigrate to China."

Since leaving the White House at the end of President George W. Bush's term, Rice has visited several schools around the country to urge children to use education as a vehicle for success.

She's also planning to write two books - one on foreign policy and the other on how her parents' commitment to education shaped her life. Her transition to private life includes a return to her academic home at Stanford University where she had been a provost and is now a political science professor.

Before the assembly at Bodine, Rice met with about 20 students from the school's world affairs council, who were reminded that Rice was there as an educator.

At the assembly, questions from the students were pre-selected and ranged in subject from female empowerment to her international travel experiences and whether racial discrimination still exists, particularly with the recent election of Barack Obama.

"I was very proud the day that he was elected, because it means America has overcome a lot of her old wounds," Rice said, adding that it would be a mistake to assume that the country has completely overcome past discrimination.

The poor and minority groups still encounter discrimination, she added. "And so I think the cause of social justice is best served by a really good educational system."

Rice told the students that her life changed the day when she walked into a course on international politics taught by Joseph Korbel, a specialist on the Soviet Union.

"He just opened up this world to me ... of Russia and the Soviet Union, and international history, and I had found my passion," she said.

"Now, people asked all the time, 'What in the world is a young black girl from Birmingham, Ala., doing studying Russian and the Soviet Union?' And I couldn't explain why it was. ... It was like love."

From 1989 to 1991, Rice was an adviser on Soviet and European affairs on President George H.W. Bush's National Security Council. In 2001 she became the second President Bush's national security adviser - the first African American woman to hold the post. In Bush's second term, she was appointed secretary of state.

Throughout her talk with students, Rice encouraged Bodine students to "stay open to what your passion might be."

"It might find you," she said, "in a class you take, in fellow students that you talk to. ... And never ever let anyone tell you that you shouldn't be interested in this or that just because of where you came from, or who you are, or what you look like."