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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 educa

tion.

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 shirtsleeves 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, 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 Viet-Nam 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 212 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. 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 Viet Cong.

Last year over 12,000 civilians were kidnaped 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 Viet Cong 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 Viet Cong 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, 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 Viet-Nam. 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 Viet Cong murder the mother of an officer in the Army of Viet-Nam 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 Viet-Nam 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 Viet-Nam, they can and they will prevail elsewhere.

And if the takeover in Viet-Nam 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 of freedom.

If this "war of liberation" triumphs, who will be "liberated" next? There is a job of liberation in South Viet-Nam. 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 Viet-Nam 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 Viet-Nam by force.

They may delay us, but I warn them and I pledge you they will never deter 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, with all our wealth and promise, must be no less determined.

Our time is filled with peril. has really ever been tested. Our tasks are enormous ones.

So it has been every time that freedom

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.]

FEDERAL WOMAN'S AWARD

The President's Remarks Upon Presenting the 6th Annual Awards and Announcing the Establishment of a New Study Group on Careers for Women. February 28, 1966'

The under-utilization of American women continues to be the most tragic and the most senseless waste of this century. It is a waste that we can no longer afford. Our economy is crying out for their services. In the next decade alone we will need 900,000 additional school teachers and college instructors; 1 million additional specialists in the health services; 800,000 additional science and engineering technicians; 700,000 additional scientists and engineers; and 42 million additional State and local employees, exclusive of our teachers.

The requirements in these fields alone will be 110,000 additional trained specialists every month for the next 10 years. That requirement cannot be met by men alone and unless we begin now to open more and more professions to our women and unless we begin now to train our women to enter those professions, then the needs of our Nation just are not going to be met.

Already we are suffering an acute shortage of nurses. This very moment 60,000 additional nurses in our hospitals and clinics and another 5,000 additional nurses are needed in our Armed Forces. To make sure that these needs are met, to help open the doors of oppor

tunity to every American woman, I am today announcing the establishment of a new group on careers for women.

This study group will be made up of women whose qualifications, I think, are very amply established, the recipients of the Federal Woman's Award since its establishment 6 years ago. I expect the members of this study group to probe deeply into the problems of the working woman. I want them to tell us which career fields appear to offer the greatest promise for our women.

I want them to tell us what our colleges and universities can do to help young women to prepare and to train for these fields. I want them to tell us what we can do to change the attitudes of employers toward hiring women. I want them to seek new ways of making government service attractive to women who have demonstrated ability.

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DOMESTIC HEALTH AND EDUCATION

The President's Message to the Congress. March 1, 1966

To the Congress of the United States:

A nation's greatness is measured by its concern for the health and welfare of its people. Throughout the history of our democracy, this commitment has grown and deepened.

The education of our people is a national investment. The health of our people is essential to the pursuit of happiness.

Today we can set ambitious goals for the future:

full education for every citizen to the limits of his capacity to absorb it;

good health for every citizen to the limits of our country's capacity to provide it.

The 88th and 89th Congresses have moved toward these goals. During the past three sessions, Congress has:

enacted 20 landmark measures in health and 19 in education; doubled the appropriations for health programs and increased the budget for our Office of Education more than five-fold. The achievements of the past three years promise a dramatic enrichment of American life.

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I have proposed a total Federal investment in education and training during the coming year in excess of $10 billion-a three-fold increase since 1961.

Our education programs must be administered wisely and well. Shortly after passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, I directed that the Office of Education be reorganized to carry out its expanded responsibilities more effectively and efficiently. This reorganization has now been completed.

In addition, we establish the new post of Assistant Secretary for Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to strengthen program coordination throughout the government.

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