Remarks at a Ceremony Honoring Mrs. Mona M. Dayton as "Teacher of the Year."

Mrs. Dayton, Secretary Gardner, Mr. Dubinsky, my friends:

I am delighted to be here with you this morning to pay this very just tribute to this very dedicated lady.

My thoughts, like those of many Americans these days, are very much on battles and soldiers and the bitter necessities of war. But I am very delighted this morning to take a moment away from these concerns, although not completely away.

I thought this morning of something that General Omar Bradley said many years ago. I was just reading his book the other day describing the landing on Normandy.¹ General Bradley said, "The teacher is the real soldier of democracy. Others can defend it, but only he can make it work."

¹ "A Soldier's Story" (New York: Henry Holt & Co., Inc., 1951).

So we are here today to honor a woman who makes democracy work. She is a soldier in the greatest and the most glorious battle that man has ever fought--the battle for the truth and the understanding that alone has set man free, and that will, alone and ultimately, keep men free.

This is the third time that I have honored such a soldier as Teacher of the Year, but never, I think, have Look magazine and the Council of Chief State School Officers made a more deserving or a better choice. We have certainly never honored a more unusual teacher than the remarkable and renowned lady we have come here this morning to congratulate, Mrs. Mona Dayton of Tucson, Arizona.

She has done more than just teach her first graders how to read and write. She has taken the great outdoors of Tucson as her classroom, and the great desert as her desk. She has taken the animals as her teaching assistants, and she has taken nature and beauty by one hand, and boys and girls by the other, and she has made them dance together in a happy circle of understanding and respect.

In Mrs. Dayton's class, I am told that there are a number of 6-year-old scientists who know how to build a sun dial and know how to construct a model volcano. That is very impressive. When I was 6 years old I knew little about model volcanoes, but I have learned a lot since then from sitting on top of the real thing.

Mrs. Dayton, your remarkable class also contains, I am informed, some young naturalists. Their classmates, I hear, include an owl and a 6-foot boa constrictor. I had better not let Mrs. Johnson and Liz Carpenter hear about that or they will take another tour to Arizona from Big Bend. And I am happy that that boa constrictor is not here with you today.

But Mrs. Dayton has opened the eyes and the ears of her first graders so much that there are poets among them. A little girl named Karen described a night in the desert, and this is the way she described it: "Stardust on the cactus, Owls in their nest, Birds listening to your words in the wind."

This child and her teacher help explain why Government has increased its commitment to education and to training, since I became President, from a little less than $5 billion to a little over $10 billion in less than 3 years.

Today Mrs. Dayton receives a pin and a plaque which symbolize her honor. I know that she shares my view that in this day and age we can get no more value from every dollar we spend than that we spend on education and on health.

I was looking at the figures with my Budget Director this morning. The last 3 years we have taken our health expenditures in the Nation from a little under $5 billion to a little over $10 billion, and it is paying such rich dividends in the solutions and the answers we are finding to disease.

So, Mrs. Dayton, you receive my congratulations. I also want to appoint you this morning to serve on the commission which will select next year's Presidential Scholars here at the White House. America's teachers are not only making democracy work, they are helping it to flourish and to triumph, and they deserve our gratitude, for as it has been said, "Through the teacher's hands pass all members of every profession."

I am so glad that you could be here with us, and you could be hearing some of these things that you deserve during your lifetime. I have with me this morning a teacher that I started out teaching with in the first school I taught in many years ago, Mrs. Opal Way Brooks.

Come over, Mrs. Brooks. I want you to meet Mrs. Dayton. She and I both taught in the same school a few years ago.

And Mrs. Brooks, I want you to know another teacher. He is a retired man. He is here with me this morning and I want him to come over and meet you--Mr. Dubinsky. He has been teaching me for about 30 years, too. Now he is going away. They said he retired while he could still read his obituaries. He is going to be away for about 7 weeks and then he is going to come back to us.