The prime minister recounted a bit of his own personal history, beginning with his childhood and what it was like growing up where and when he did.
"When I was your age, my mother and father had a lot of hope in me," he said. "My father was a taxi driver, and my mother a nurse. And I passed for Government High School."
Mr. Christie explained to the children that after being one of the relatively few students accepted to GHS, he was later kicked out of the school when he was 13.
He said that was the first time he saw his parents cry, "because I had brought shame to them because everyone in our neighbourhood would have known that the Christie child had failed."
He recalled the shame of having to return to Eastern Senior School with the stigma of the one who was put out of GHS.
Mr. Christie said, though, that he came to realize something important.
"The one thing I realized through all that, that experience of being put out, was that my mother and father never gave up on me, that they had to rebuild , get in my head to tell me ‘look at yourself,’" he recalled.
"That’s when I began to find out about character and what it meant."
Mr. Christie stressed the importance of character to the fulfillment of the children’s’ dreams.
"To be anything, anything, you must have character," he said.
Clad in a blue jacket with the Character Counts logo on the breast – blue being the colour in the programme that symbolizes trustworthiness – Mr. Christie sought to impress on the children that people must know a person is trustworthy, and that a person even at their tender age must begin to learn to show respect.
He also told the children some of Education, Science and Technology Minister Alfred Sears’ story.
Minister Sears, the prime minister informed the students, was a street boy, a "bad boy" who was repeatedly locked up in a school for special boys.
He pointed out, though, that Minister Sears had been the beneficiary of the interest of Milo B. Butler and members of the Roman Catholic Church, whose influence changed his life.
"They saw in the little boy locked up a diamond. They cared, and so they showed caring and a feeling for him, and that little boy who was Alfred Sears, who was locked away, went on to university to become a professor at a university in New York," Mr. Christie said.
"(He) then came home and became the top lawyer – attorney general – in The Bahamas, and then became the minister of education, responsible for education in The Bahamas."
The prime minister was the keynote speaker at the Character Counts Talent Explosion 2007, which saw performances by representatives from the various schools participating in the project.
Chief Superintendent Hulan Hanna, popular artist KB and others also addressed the children at the talent show.
Character Counts is, according to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, a framework that promotes character education. Its aim is to raise the consciousness and commitment of all to embrace the concept that character counts, everywhere, all the time.
