Good morning, ladies and gentlemen:
I want to welcome all of you who are taking part in this Fulbright program. Perhaps those of you who are teachers from abroad would hold up your hands. We can't tell the people from abroad from the people at home any more, which is a fairly serious thing!
We want to express a very warm welcome to you. This program has been one in which we have taken the greatest pride and satisfaction in the last 15 years. Out of some of the difficulties and troubles of the early forties has come at least one bright flower, and I think that this exchange of students and exchange of teachers--the exchange of students is an old tradition, going back earlier than the Middle Ages, going from one country to another, trying to acquire the knowledge which might be concentrated in a particular city or state--but the movement of teachers is a fairly recent phenomenon, and I welcome it very much.
We depend upon education. This is a remarkable period in which we live, but what really challenges us, and I think we see this every day here in Washington, is the ability of the great mass of the people to make judgments about increasingly complicated and sophisticated questions, economics and politics in war and in peace, and all the others. Experts disagree. New data crowds upon us. Research opens up wide horizons, and if we believe in a free society we believe in the ability of people to make an intelligent judgment, the great mass of the people. They can't do that without the best education, and they can't get the best education without the best teachers.
Knowledge is international. Peace is international, indivisible, and I think the cause of freedom is strongly indivisible. Therefore, we welcome you here and we feel that regardless of how far you may have journeyed to come to the United States, that while you may come as you do from a free land, you also visit one, and, therefore, we welcome you to a home, in a sense. And we are confident that you will learn perhaps as much as you teach, which is somewhat rare in the teaching profession.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke in the Flower Garden at the White House at 9:45 a.m. to a group of teachers from 21 countries who had been attending orientation sessions in Washington before going to their assignments throughout the United States. The teachers from abroad were exchanging positions with an equal number of American teachers pursuant to the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961 (75 Stat. 527) whose principal sponsors were Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas and Representative Wayne L. Hays of Ohio.
John F. Kennedy, Remarks to a Group of Fulbright-Hays Exchange Teachers. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237327
