Message to the Members of the National Education Association Meeting in Atlantic City,

I AM DELIGHTED to have this opportunity to extend greetings to the members of the National Education Association and, through you, to your fellow teachers throughout the Nation. I wish you success in your convention, in your professional endeavors which are so vital to our future, and in your efforts to improve the quality and support of American education.

It is fitting that this message is conveyed to you by my friend, Frank Thompson, cosponsor Of the Administration's Morse-Thompson bill for assisting our public schools. The most crucial period for this legislation is still ahead. But it is a sound measure. It is a just measure. It is an urgently needed measure--and I have every reason to believe that, with the help of organizations such as yours, and with the help of Congressmen such as Frank Thompson, I will sign into law before the summer is out this Nation's first Federal Aid to Education program.

That will be the end of a forty-year battle. But more than an end, it will be a beginning. For mere money alone is not enough. Enactment of this bill will not improve the excellence of education overnight. Our goal--our objective in obtaining these funds--is not simply to provide an adequate educational system--or even a merely good educational system. Our goal must be an educational system that will permit the maximum development of the talents of every American boy and girl.

This will require continued leadership and stimulation by the Federal Government-including the enactment of other educational measures already proposed. It will require increased effort by our state and local school systems, by school boards and parents and individual citizens.

But perhaps the greatest responsibility of all will rest with you, the teachers of America. In the last analysis, no amount of federal aid, no amount of new classrooms, no amount of state and local support can succeed without your daily efforts to improve the minds of our children. That is why you bear a responsibility for the Nation's future that is as heavy as that of any officeholder--and that is also why I think it imperative that our Federal Aid to Education program include funds for teacher's salaries.

No man who sits in the White House can fail to be sobered by the problems which will face future generations as well as our own. Whatever decisions we make, whatever events occur in our time, the students of today and tomorrow will face in their time a host of decisions so critical and complex as to demand a degree of wisdom and dedication never previously reached. Thus, to a large extent, the success of freedom then depends upon the success of free education now.

Holding fast to basic concepts while discarding outmoded practices, recognizing the progress that has been made as well as the problems we face, and justifying educational excellence on its own merits and not simply in terms of "cold war" competition, let us work together, make every effort and meet every challenge to build this Nation's most fundamental resource: the human mind.