Remarks in New York City Before the Convention of the National Education Association.

Secretary Celebrezze, Senator Morse, majority leader of the House of Representatives, Congressman Carl Albert, Dr. Edinger and Dr. Carr--who have labored in education's cause and helped us so much--and all of my fellow educators:

I have brought with me today Secretary Tony Celebrezze, the great administrator of the HEW and the best lobbyist the teachers of this country has; Senator Wayne Morse, the valiant fighter for education and the chairman of all the Senate committees that report these bills constantly--Senator Morse; the distinguished majority leader, Carl Albert, a Rhodes Scholar and education leader, majority leader in the House of Representatives, and my neighbor from Oklahoma; and I, too, want you to meet one of the great fellows that works on my staff, and who has been assigned the special subject of education and has made it his day and night work all year--Douglass Cater.

I greet you as the shapers of American society.

Emerson said: "The true test of a civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the Country turns out."

Education, more than any single force, will mold the citizen of the future. That citizen, in turn, will really determine the greatness of our society. And it is up to you to make that education equal to our towering expectations of the America that we love and the America that is to come.

And I came here today to reaffirm to you your Government's intention to continue to help in that task.

In the last 19 months your Congress and your President have worked shoulder-to-shoulder together in the most fruitful partnership for American education in all the history of the American Nation.

We passed the Higher Education Facilities Act.

We passed the Library Services Act to improve our libraries as storehouses of learning.

We passed the Vocational and Technical Education Act.

We passed the Nurses Training Act.

We passed the poverty measure--the Economic Opportunity Act, appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars, requested a billion-two this year, offering millions of young people the necessary training to help them escape from poverty.

We passed the $1,200 million Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965--the broadest, the most meaningful, and the most sweeping Federal commitment to education that this Nation has ever made.

And this is the first week of the first fiscal year in which funds, under this act, will begin to flow to States and communities in every 'part of this land, in every State in this country.

We are going to pass the higher education bill to provide help to colleges and students this year.

We are going to pass the Federal arts and humanities foundation bill to help those engaged in the study of the humanities and in the practice of the arts, and we are going to pass it this year.

And next year--in my next State of the Union Message--I intend to offer more new proposals to improve the education of all Americans. And I am here to tell you today that we are not going to stop until every child in this great and beautiful land of ours can have all of the education, of the highest quality, which his or her ambition demands and his or her mind can absorb.

So, I come here this afternoon to speak to you not of our triumphs, but of our tasks; not of the success that we have had, but the sacrifices that are to be made; not of the achievements of yesterday, but the aspirations of tomorrow. For this is not an occasion for self-congratulations. It is rather a time to reflect on our mounting needs and on our present deficiencies.

More than 1 million students--who are not here to speak for themselves this afternoon--drop out of school, their talents wasted, their intelligence lost to the Nation, their futures shattered by their failure and by our failure.

In the next 5 years attendance in elementary and secondary schools--at 48.1 million now, in the fall of 1964--will increase by more than 4 million--almost 1 million students per year. We will need 400,000 new classrooms to meet this growth--while a half million of our present classrooms are already more than 30 years old.

And beyond 1970 the demand for education-at every level--will continue to increase.

We will need more classrooms, we will need more books, we will need more teachers, we will need more schools on a scale that we have never dreamed of even a decade ago.

Nor is it enough to give a student a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. We must make sure that the quality of that education is equal to his capacity to learn. We must make sure that it stimulates creativity rather than stifling it. We must make sure that it enlarges the mind rather than narrowing it--that he receives not merely a diploma but learning, in its real, broadest, and most meaningful and most humane sense.

In pursuit of these goals, I have asked the White House to send out invitations to the White House Conference on Education. That Conference--I hope it is the largest and best of its kind ever held in this Nation--will take place on July the 20th and 21st of this year at the White House in Washington. It will bring together educators and informed citizens from every State in this Nation. It will seek the answer to the immense question: How can a growing nation in an increasingly complex world provide education of the highest quality for all of its people ?

The search for this answer radiates into every corner of American life. It must deal with educational opportunity and techniques from pre-school age to the most advanced of studies. It must look beyond the classroom to the family, and to the surroundings and the environment of the student.

For the process of learning is not a carefully defined and isolated segment of a person's life. It is part of an organic whole, embracing all the forces which shape the man.

And if we ignore these forces we do so at the peril of learning itself. Nothing is more dangerous than the easy assumption that simply by putting more money into more schools we will emerge with an educated, a trained, and an enlightened Nation.

And it is this kind of assumption that I came here to challenge today. I want you to bring all the tools of modern knowledge-from physics to psychology--to bear on the increase of learning. And if these tools are still inadequate then it is our job to fashion new ones and better ones.

To guide discussion in this Conference we are formulating a series of questions. And I hope you will give these questions your most careful thought and your boldest imagination in the weeks between now and the Conference.

They include:

How can we bring first-class education to the city slums and to the impoverished rural areas? Today the children of 5 million families are denied it.

How can we stimulate every child to catch the love of learning so he wants to stay in school? One million children now drop out of school each year.

How do we guarantee that new funds will bring new ideas and new techniques to our school system--not just simply expand the old and the outmoded ?

How can local, and State, and Federal Government best cooperate to make education the first--the first among all of this Nation's goals ?

These are a few of the important questions which I hope the White House Conference examines. And I would like to mention one other: Our country today is among the leaders in the community of nations of the world. How well is our education system preparing our citizens of this one Nation for their responsibility to some 120 other nations in the world ?

But even as we prepare for this Conference, your Government is acting. We are now completing a thorough overhaul and reorganization of the Office of Education. We are equipping it to deal with its new and its future responsibilities of the 20th century.

We have also established a National Center for Educational Statistics, an office of programs for educating the disadvantaged, an Office of Equal Educational Opportunity so people of all races, of all creeds, of all sections, are given equal treatment. And we are, at this moment, in the process of preparing more and exciting new programs that our task force is working on this week to present next year when the Congress comes back.

In the next few days I will propose a National Teachers Corps to enlist thousands of dedicated teachers to work alongside local teachers in city slums and in areas of rural poverty where they can really serve their Nation. They will be young people, preparing for teaching careers. They will be experienced teachers willing to give a year to the places in their country that need them the most. They can bring the best in our Nation to the help of the poorest of our children.

And I announce today that your President will submit to the Congress and will support a program of fellowships for elementary and secondary schoolteachers so that they can replenish their knowledge and improve their abilities. And this program will assist teachers--displaced by the process of school integration--to acquire the skills that are necessary to permit them to perform new and challenging jobs in a new environment, in a new century.

For you and I are both concerned about the problem of the dismissal of Negro teachers as we move forward--as we move forward with the desegregation of the schools of America. I applaud the action that you have already taken.

For my part, I have directed the Commissioner of Education to pay very special attention, in reviewing the desegregation plans, to guard against any pattern of teacher dismissal based on race or national origin.

When the upgrading of the teaching staff is required in newly integrated districts, I have instructed educational officials to provide funds for teacher institutes and to assist the school districts through title IV of the Civil Rights Act.

And where an integrated school system requires fewer teachers than those required to operate two segregated school systems, I have directed Federal officials to .provide special reemployment services through a national program carried out by the U.S. Employment Service.

And when unemployed teachers need and when they desire refresher training, I have ordered Federal officials to provide this training, with full allowances, under the Manpower Development and Training Act that we have already passed. And such a training program, I think you know, has already proven its great value in this city. It is being sponsored by the Urban League at Yeshiva University.

Now, in these and in many other ways we continue to 'pursue this--the central goal of this administration.

But the basic thought, and the programs of future action, must come from you teachers. And the deeds which give meaning to the law must also come from you teachers. For a Federal law is not an education. A national program is not a developing child. A Presidential speech is not a trained Nation.

But as a teacher--I'm still on leave of absence from Houston public school who has labored with you through the years in the elementary, high schools, and a short while in the colleges, I remind you that we have talked together, and dreamed together, and philosophized together about the need, the great need, for all of these things for 30 years or more since I finished college. We have even urged, since then, that they be put in the annual party platforms of both the Republican and Democratic Party for your consideration on election day.

Well, I'm here to tell you this afternoon that this is a different day, a different hour, and a different month. The time for talking and dreaming and philosophizing and writing platforms is gone, and the time for doing things instead of talking about them is here.

All these things are empty and they are sterile without the will and without the effort at every level of our national life that is needed to transform intention into reality--the mandate of the law into the fulfillment of life. And in this, too, the hopes of our Nation are resting on you.

I do not need to talk to this audience about the importance of education. It's been your life work. No strain in our national life is more deeply rooted or more enduring than this faith in learning. It is the pathway to opportunity and the good life. It is the key to wise and satisfying use of our leisure time. It is the door to each man's highest use of his highest powers--which is happiness. It can bring fulfillment to the many, and to the happy few those transcendent achievements which really enrich the human race.

And if these things are true for every society, how much more important they are to our free society.

In every corner of this world in which we live, not only our democracy but the idea of democracy itself is today being challenged. As the world grows in danger and as it grows in complexity, and as humanity seems dwarfed by the forces it has loosed, man's ability to govern himself is again being questioned.

We will not prove democracy's strength by faith or even by the experience of our past. We will prove it by the works of the future.

I am not concerned with all the promises that have been made to you all through the years. I am not concerned with the times you have been taken up on the mountain and asked to look out at the future beyond.

I am not concerned with your hopes, or your plans, or your dreams of the past when you went out as the pioneers did with their gun on their shoulder in search of food for their families. What I am concerned with, and what I want you to be concerned with, is results--the coonskins that they bring back and put on the wall.

And, as I said earlier, together we are not just going to talk and dream. We are going to do. The day of the talkers is gone. The day of the doers is here.

And with that kind of a comment I better come to a speedy conclusion and go on and get on with the job.

That future--hopeful but still unknown-is today struggling to be born in millions of young and waiting minds in thousands of classrooms in this restless continent.

So, when you go back from this great convention, in this first city of our land, I hope that you will remember the words of a great leader of Government and a great educator who, in the early days of our Republic, warned us that "an educated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free men recognize, and the only ruler that free men desire."

Today we are faced with many trying and complex and difficult decisions and problems. But I can tell you here this afternoon that I have never been prouder of my country than I am now. And the pride that I have in my country is largely due to the years of toil and dedication and satisfaction of the teachers who made it so.

Thank you.