Greeting to the National Education Association.

My dear Miss Samuelson:

Your, letter of January thirteenth is a very cogent defense of a well-established American principle. I appreciate its candor and I am glad to assure you that I am not in disagreement with it.

If some activities of the Government during recent years have seemed to some persons in the field of education to violate the principle defended in your letter, the reason is that these activities have not concerned education alone. Always there has been the element of relief. In fact, it has been the relief feature which has justified the Federal Government's supplying funds for programs so largely educational as have been the emergency education program, the emergency aid to rural schools, the program of college student aid, and, in fact, the whole National Youth Administration. Had these programs been wholly educational and had they represented essentially a Federal plan to aid in the support of education, it would have been my policy to use only the regularly constituted agencies of education to administer them.

Relief, however, is a problem with which educational people are not generally well acquainted. It is even doubtful whether educational authorities would wish to administer the relief phases of the combined program of education and relief involved in such an enterprise as the emergency education program. Cooperation, therefore, between relief agencies and educational agencies was imperatively necessary.

Will you not accept my assurance that if and when the Federal Government enters into any program of Federal participation in education where the sole, or even the primary, consideration is the advancement of the Nation's educational system, it shall be my purpose to avoid all division of responsibility and to expect the educational agencies, Federal, State and local, to have charge of such a program?

Very sincerely yours,

Miss Agnes Samuelson,

President, National Education Association,

Washington, D.C.