Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks in Atlantic City at the Convention of the American Association of School Administrators

February 16, 1966

Mr. Chairman, Governor Hughes, distinguished Members of the most distinguished New Jersey congressional delegation, Mr. Brain, Mr. Platt, Dr. Carr, my dear friends:

As I was observing the presentation of these awards, before you reached the last one, I was almost tempted to say, "California, here I come."

I want to thank Governor Hughes for permitting me to come back to this great city. This is my favorite convention city. And the New Jersey congressional delegation, here on the platform with me tonight, are my favorite congressional delegation. And I don't think that we'll need any help, but if we do, it will be prayers, and I brought Dr. Billy Graham along with me to do the praying.

I am very honored to accept your award and I'm very .happy to be here tonight with the big brass of American education. I might have been with you tonight under other auspices--except that 30 years ago I left teaching for a different pursuit.

Tonight, our professions differ, but actually we have the same task: to build a society that is worthy of free men. Two hundred years ago our fathers laid the foundation. Two years ago I challenged my fellow citizens to get on with the job. I said that we must build the Great Society in our cities, and in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Tonight our work is underway. Much of the needed legislation has already been enacted: more than a score of landmark measures in the field of education alone.

So it is a real thrill to me to read the roll call of these historic acts of the last few months in the Congress:

--the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964,

--the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965,

--Medicare,

--the Natural Beauty Act,

--the Higher Education Act of 1965.

And--not last and not least--the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

Laws are only designs for achievement. The barriers that we must overcome do not yield merely because Congress takes a vote or because the President signs a bill.

Two barriers are the most unyielding, each reinforcing the other in blocking our progress.

The first is poverty. Those of us who have worked in schools know what it means for someone who starts life as a victim of poverty. It is hard to teach a hungry child. Poverty breeds handicaps of mind and body which cripple him before he ever has a chance to get ahead. And we have learned all too well that poverty passes on its curse generation to generation.

The second barrier is racial discrimination. Because of it, children grow up aliens in their native land. For a ghetto-whether white or black or brown--is less than half a world. No child can be fully educated unless his life is opened to the wonderful variety that this world affords.

Two weeks ago, I called for the International Educational Act of 1966 to promote the worldwide commerce of knowledge--to declare that learning is not a commodity which can be confined at the water's edge.

Yet within our own country there are still, tonight, racial walls against hope and opportunity. Between the slums of the inner cities and their spreading suburbs, there are gulfs as deep and as wide as any ocean.

And if education is to be worthy of its good name, we must find the ways to span these gulfs.

I pledge to you tonight that the Federal Government will not be a silent partner in this enterprise.

Therefore I am sending Congress five top priority requests:

--to enlarge each one of the programs in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--and to make them run through 1970;

--to double funds for our imaginative and our precedent-breaking Operation Head Start, which will next year help more than 700,000 youngsters from poor homes get ready for the rigors of learning;

--to fund the new National Teacher Corps so that our best college graduates can be recruited to work in our worst schools;

--to pass the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 to help pay for school lunches for those children who really need them, without subsidizing those who can afford to buy their own. We also want school breakfasts for children who would otherwise start their day with empty stomachs.

Finally--and this summarizes, really, the reams of recommendations in one single sentence--my budget this year proposes a $10 billion investment in education and training. In 1960 your Government was spending only a third this much. The Office of Education alone will spend on programs six times as much as it spent only 6 years ago.

And I came up here to Atlantic City tonight to tell you that this is only the beginning of what we're going to do in the field of education.

It was almost 200 years ago that James Madison declared that Federal and State Governments "are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers, and designed for different purposes." They are not "mutual rivals and enemies." They are partners.

Madison's definition, Governor Hughes, has not changed, though the partnership has grown closer and more creative.

If education is to achieve its promise in America, it cannot and must not be done in Washington alone. Each State and each community must fashion its own design and shape its own institutions.

But we will need a common vision to build schools to match our common hopes for the future.

Every school will be different, but the differences will not range as they do today between satisfactory and shocking. We will have instead a diversity of excellence.

Tomorrow's school will be a school without walls--a school that's built of doors which open to the entire community.

Tomorrow's school will reach out to the places that enrich the human spirit: to the museums, to the theaters, to the art galleries, to the parks, to the rivers, and to the mountains.

It will ally itself with the city, with the city's busy streets and its factories and its assembly lines and its laboratories--so that the work does not seem an alien place for the student.

Tomorrow's school will be the center of community life, for the grownups as well as the children: "a shopping center of human services." It might have a community health clinic, a public library, a theater, and recreation facilities.

It will provide formal education for all citizens--and it will not close its doors any more at 3 o'clock. It will employ its buildings round the clock and its teachers round the year. We just cannot afford to have an $85 billion plant in this country open less than 30 percent of the time.

In every past age, leisure has been a privilege enjoyed by the few at the expense of the many. But in the age that's waiting to be born, leisure will belong to the many at the expense of none. Our people must learn to use this gift of time, and that means another challenge for tomorrow's schools.

I am not describing a distant Utopia, but I am describing the kind of education which must be the great and the urgent work of our time. By the end of this decade, unless the work is well along, our opportunity will have slipped away from us.

Many people, as William James once said, shed tears for justice, generosity, and beauty, but never really recognize those virtues when they meet them out on the street.

Some people are this way about rebuilding our society. They love the idea. But in the heat and grime, somehow they just lose their zeal. They discover that progress is a battle and not a parade--and they fall away from the line of march.

You know that the job of building a better school and a better Nation is hard and often thankless work. Someone must take on the perilous task of leadership. Someone in shirt-sleeves must turn ideas into actions, dollars into programs. Someone must fight the lonely battles in each community--make the accommodations, win the supporters, get the results, and finally get the job done.

Many of you have endured this hard and long journey from hope to reality--when the applause died, and the crowd thinned out, and you were alone with the dull administrative details still to be done.

But this is how a Great Society is really built: brick by brick, and in the toil and the noise of each day.

We have so little reason to be discouraged. Others face tasks so much more difficult than ours. Only last week out in Honolulu I sat across the table from the very young leader of South Vietnam and I heard him say of his country: "We were deluding ourselves with the idea that our weaknesses could not be remedied while we were fighting a war .... We will not completely drive out the aggressor until we make a start at eliminating these political and social defects." In other words, while we are winning a war, we must get at the defects that caused it.

The work of his government will not be easy. But these are not timid tasks for timid men. They have learned that government must meet the outreach of its people's hopes.

And there at Honolulu, I pledged support and the support of the American people to their plans for education in their country where men die at 35, and where the per capita income is less than $100 a year. This year alone we will help them build 2,800 classrooms, three times the average for the last 10 years.

We will help them train 13,400 teachers, eight times the yearly average of the last decade.

We will help them distribute 6 million textbooks. We've already distributed more than 8 million.

And we will help them educate almost a fourth as many doctors as the total number of doctors they now have in their entire country.

This little country maintains 700,000 men in its armed forces tonight, over 2 ½ times as many for its size as the United States of America.

Yet, these leaders voiced no weariness before the task of getting on with reforms in education and health and agriculture. And if they keep their commitments, they will be the real revolutionaries of Asia. For the real revolution is to build schools, and through building these schools, build a nation.

What they are committed to do, with America's help, must be done under the most brutal conditions that you can imagine. Their civilian population lives in constant danger of terror and death at the hands of the Vietcong.

Last year over 12,000 civilians were kidnapped or killed by the Communist terrorists. There were more than 36,000 incidents of terror last year--an increase of 10,000 over the year before. Two days ago the Vietcong killed 39 civilians and wounded 7 others as they rode on buses.

Terrorism--deliberately planned and coldly carried out--continues to be the chief instrument of the Vietcong aggression in South Vietnam. It is not just a byproduct of their military action; it is the way that they actually hope to win the war.

Who--and what--are their targets? School teachers and school administrators, health officials, village leaders, schools, hospitals, research stations, and medical clinics-all of those people and places that are essential to the growth of a healthy and a free society.

This is the terrible scarred face of the war that's too seldom seen and too little understood. Often it is not even reported by our journals that are most concerned about the war in Vietnam. The war on the other front is not heard from nearly enough. These incidents usually happen in the rural areas that are rather remote from either the reporter's or the camera's eye. Observers are not invited when the Vietcong murder the mother of an officer in the Army of Vietnam as reprisal against her son--or torture and dismember the master of a local school.

But people who hate war ought not ignore this strategy of terror.

What is its purpose? It is through fear and death to force the people of South Vietnam into submission. It is just as simple and as grim as that.

And it just must not and will not succeed.

If these tactics prevail in Vietnam, they can and they will prevail elsewhere.

And if the takeover of Vietnam can be achieved by a highly organized Communist force employing violence against a civilian population, then it can be achieved in another country, at another time, with an even greater cost to freedom.

If this "war of liberation" triumphs, who will be "liberated" next?

There is a job of liberation in South Vietnam. It is liberation from terror, liberation from disease, liberation from hunger, and liberation from ignorance.

Unless this job is done, a military victory in South Vietnam would not be victory at all. It would only be a brief delay until the aggressor returns to feed on the continuing misery of the people.

We have the military strength tonight to convince the Communists that they cannot achieve the conquest of South Vietnam by force. They may delay us, but I warn them and I pledge you they will never deter or or defeat us.

But the building of a better society is the main test of our strength--our basic purpose. Until the people of the villages and the farms of that little unhappy country know that they personally count, that they are cared about, that their future is their own--only then will we know that real victory and success is possible.

I came away from Honolulu filled with new hope and new energy. I came away convinced that we cannot raise a double standard to the world. We cannot hold freedom less dear in Asia than in Europe or be less willing to sacrifice for men whose skin just happens to be a different color!

If this little young nation that's ridden with dangers can show such determination, we--we, with all of our wealth and promise--must be no less determined.

Our time is filled with peril. So it has been every time that freedom has really ever been tested.

Our tasks are enormous ones. But so are our resources.

Our burdens are heavy and will grow heavier. But the Bible counsels that we "be not weary in well-doing."

The house of freedom may never be completed, but it will never fall--so long as you and I and those who share our commitment keep this vision of what we in America stand for, and for what we Americans are determined to build throughout the world.

Thank you, and good night.

Note: The President spoke at 8:45 p.m. at Convention Hall in Atlantic City, N.J, following the presentation to him of the National Education Award of 1966. In his opening words he referred to Frank K. Platt, President of Associated Exhibitors of the National Education Association and chairman of the convention, Richard J. Hughes, Governor of New Jersey, George B. Brain, Dean of the College of Education, Washington State University, and William G. Carr, Executive Secretary of the National Education Association.

More than 5,000 delegates attended the annual convention of the American Association of School Administrators.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks in Atlantic City at the Convention of the American Association of School Administrators Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238178

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