Remarks at the Alberto Masferrer Normal School, San Andres, El Salvador.

President Sanchez, Professor Aguilar, students, teachers, and friends:

During the past 24 hours I have been meeting with my fellow leaders of the Americas, the Presidents of Central America. We have been reviewing the progress Central America has made, and the problems Central America has encountered, since the great regional adventure began 7 years ago.

Nothing we have discussed equals in importance--or in urgency--the kind of work that you are doing here.

If educational reform succeeds, then all else that we are trying to do will succeed.

If it does not succeed, and succeed swiftly, then no amount of good will or economic investment will be sufficient.

This may seem a heavy responsibility to lay upon young teachers and teachers-to-be. It may seem to you, as you stand before your class on a warm afternoon--wondering whether you can awaken the interest of your students--that the real challenges of your time are elsewhere.

Indeed, few countries have invested early enough and well enough in schools and teachers and in books. This starvation of education-with its third-class citizenship for teachers, its narrow circle of students, its dull, mechanical drilling of facts into young minds--was never good enough. It is a prescription for disaster today.

How can a democracy gather the support it needs for progressive change unless it can reach its people through the printed word?

How can peace between nations be secured unless the masses of men learn to reason and to appreciate the values of other cultures than their own?

So as you stand in your classroom, confronting your students, I hope you will sense how vital it is that your students learn to think, not just to repeat what you tell them. I hope you will remember that what you accomplish with them may have a tremendous effect on the future of your entire country.

This morning I paid a happy visit to a little school in San Salvador that bears my name. Many of you will teach in such a school someday yourself. You will be using an exciting new device--educational television --as your assistant. It will be your link with this normal school, where you were trained.

I was trained in a normal school, too.

The children that you teach will be, increasingly, the citizens of Central America, as well as of El Salvador--children who understand the words of Alberto Masferrer, who said, "There are only two kinds of patriotism in the Americas: the old kind, small and fruitless, which worships boundaries and the stingy, rancorous yesterday; and the new one, which leaps over boundaries and joins hands and creates a strong, dignified present, laying the groundwork for a just tomorrow."

Education will mirror that new patriotism:

--educational television that reaches all;

--university relationships that draw on the talents of each country;

--microfilm libraries that make knowledge quickly and broadly available.

But the heart of all of it is going to be you--the indispensable teachers, the awakeners, the liberators. I believe the words of your national anthem: "In each man there is an immortal hero." It is your challenge--and your magnificent opportunity--to release that hero for the future's sake.

I want to congratulate Professor Aguilar, and particularly President Sanchez, for inaugurating what will be the first all-nation educational television in all the world.

We announced yesterday a loan to your country of $1,900,000 for educational television, and a gift or a grant of $700,000 additional to go into your educational television system.

Mrs. Johnson and I were greatly inspired and stimulated when we visited American Samoa a few years ago. There the Governor--Governor Rex Lee--showed us the educational television that he had brought to American Samoa.

We said then, and we repeat now, that our own Nation is far behind in educational television, and we must catch up--and we are going to catch up.

We brought Governor Lee back to Washington to work for the International Development Agency. We are happy that what is being done in American Samoa is going to be done and improved upon here in your country.

We are going to do everything that we can to see that the fruits of technology in this great, new technique of television are brought to the homes of all the people of all the world.

Before the end of this century, educational television will be as common in the homes of the people of the world as the little red schoolhouse was in my own country when I was a boy.

You don't know how proud I am, and how happy it makes me, to know that the people of the United States can look at American Samoa and look at you and try to learn from what you are going to be doing here.

When I return to the United States, I am going to talk to our public broadcasting commission, headed by Mr. Pace, and talk to some of our other leaders, to see if I can't get the United States as progressive and as interested in educational television as your own President, President Sanchez, and the people of his country are interested.

Now, I want to say this before I leave: that every teacher and every potential teacher should hear these words that I have repeated from the lips of a great educator and a former President of the Republic of my State: "An educated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free men will acknowledge, and it it the only ruler that free men will accept."

Your President told me coming here about what a wonderful visit we were having, and how hospitable your people had been to open their arms to us. He said that he had never seen anything like it.

I said, "Mr. President, we have never seen anything like what you are doing--bringing educational television to an entire nation. I wish we could say that we have done that in the United States, but we cannot. But you can say that you have already made the beginning to being the first nation in all the world with a complete educational television system. And some day we hope the United States can catch up with you."

Now, before we say goodby, I want to congratulate all the people of this great nation for the beginning that you have made. I want to tell you how proud we are of your adventure. I hope I will be able sometime to come back and see your system after it has developed more fully.