And, once having been rewarded by the blessings of this type of educational opportunity, the whole history of the people of the United States substantiates the belief that they will do far more than has been expected of them.

It is entirely appropriate that this legislation proposes to grant aid on an equalization basis; that is, in direct proportion to need or in indirect proportion to the taxpaying ability of the localities concerned. The efficacy of that type of legislation has been well established in practice wherever it has been used.

With respect to vocational education, the results I have indicated have obtained. The best example, of course, is the Federal act under the Hill-Burton bill for hospitalization.

I would like to say that the formula adopted by Senator Hill, who for 25 years has been one of my closest personal friends, came from some of us school people who devised that method of Federal aid. We believe it will work equally well in the field of education, including library services.

It is appropriate that this bill should be an equalization bill affecting in large measure what rural people can have because it is still a fact that the farmers of the Nation have 20 percent of the Nation's schoolchildren but only 10 percent of the Nation's income. In 16 Southern and Southwestern States the farmers have 12 percent of the children and 3 percent of the income. And I don't care what is said about assessed valuation of property, the test as to paying taxes is how much income people have. And these people I am talking about don't, relatively, have it.

That is one reason for the need for this type of aid.

The United States Secretary of Agriculture recently appointed a committee who made a study, and, on the basis of that, the Secretary submitted a report known as the Development of Agriculture's Human Resources to the President of the United States.

It was my privilege to be consulted about what ought to be contained in that study.

Don't ask me what the remedy of the situation may be. This remains to be seen.

Anyway, the Secretary of Agriculture pointed out that there are various types of farming communities or areas in the United States. He presented a chart showing the average net income of commercial farmers. This income is the residual income for the operator and family labor after deducting cash expenses, depreciation, and interest on the investment.

And, having done that, here are the figures, which are certainly evidence that we haven't reached the economic millenium in this country by any means, as well off as we are:

The average net income of commercial farmers was, in the southern Piedmont region, $550 per farmer or per family; the Appalachian Mountains, $500; the southeastern hilly section, $700; the Mississippi Delta, $1,150; the sandy coastal plains along the eastern shore, $750; the Ozark-Ouachita Mountains, which happens to be my section of the country, $525; the northern Lake States, $750; northwestern New Mexico, $400; and the Cascade Mountains up in the Northwest, $950. You can compare all of these figures with the average net income of commercial farmers in the rest of the United States, which is $1,750. Even they are not too well off.

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Those I take to be ample evidences of the need for equalization for public services including libraries.

This legislation is also very appropriate in the sense that it defines rural as including places up to 10,000 population. Under modern conditions the economic, social, business, and educational relationships of these smaller cities and the surrounding neighborhoods and farm territory are too intimate and interrelated and interdependent to permit any administrative or finanicial divisions of benefits and of burdens.

I think that the definition in the legislation before you is very realistic indeed.

Another evidence of the need for this type of service is the educational attainment of rural people in areas of low economic resources.

Again referring to the official report of the United States Secretary of Agriculture, I would point that of the farmers in these low areas that I have mentioned, of which there is a map in this report, nearly 55 percent of these farmers have never been through the eighth grade. That compares to only 27 percent of the other farmers of the Nation. Only 12 percent of the low-income farmers have had a high-school education. But 27 percent of the other farmers in the Nation have had a high-school education.

And to expect these people with low educational attainment, without opportunities for adult education, an important part of which is reading material, to lift themselves by their bootstraps in this day of complicated agricultural and industrial production is expecting a little too much.

This, I take it then, is a ready means of making possible the expansion of the educational level of the people in greatest need.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to summarize what I have had to say with the following statement, that the people I speak for believe that we should, through education and whatever means are necessary that can be done legislatively, take steps that will make books and other educational means available to our adults and the children and the youth of our rural communities. And we say so for these reasons:

In the first place, books are necessary in acquiring the skills needed to be successful economical producers and to fill a useful economic function in our society. Modern American agriculture and industrial production cannot be operated by mere illiterates and ignoramuses. The extent to which we permit those conditions to exist, to that extent we are injuring our own possibilities of economic progress and prosperity.

Books are essential to the development of the qualities of good citizenship in our youth and our children of today.

Books are a necessary and useful means of acquiring moral and spiritual values essential to American ideals and the American democratic life.

Books are necessary to an understanding of the complicated world of today. Books are necessary in our country for rural people to set an example to the rest of the world.

We are in a great struggle to make the ways of democracy become dominant and accepted by most of mankind. We have perhaps a third of the world on our side; another third is definitely against us, and another third has not any idea which side it is going to fall on. And we are in the struggle for their support and for their alliance.

These people whose alliance we are seeking are mostly farmers, more than two-thirds of them. In the typical underprivileged areas of the world 90 percent of them are farmers. More than three-fourths of them are illiterate.

If we expect these people to progress we cannot do it without the means of education, whatever else is done. It would behoove the good people of America if they help set an example to the world by showing that the standard of education and opportunity for our rural people is not less than those available to any other material sector of the Nation.

America has no manpower to waste. It is hardly conceivable that we can hold our place in the world and maintain our ideals by becoming bigger. Our only remedy is to succeed by becoming better. We cannot do so by neglecting great sectors of our population. There is no betterment that is superior to attaining the highest development possible through means of education for all of our people. Thank you, sir.

Mr. LANDRUM. Thank you, Dr. Dawson.

Are there any questions?

Mr. METCALF. No questions.

Mr. LANDRUM. Thank you for that splendid statement.

Mr. PERKINS. Mr. Chairman, I certainly want to take the opportunity to compliment the gentleman on his fine statement, and to thank him personally for the remark he made about a grand school superintendent from my area.

Dr. DAWSON. You are quite welcome, sir.

Mr. LANDRUM. I believe we have next a young gentleman from Margaret Brent High School, Mr. Norman Pilkerton.

Norman, it looks as though you have some very delightful associates there with you. I understand you want to make some remarks to this committee.

STATEMENTS OF NORMAN A. PILKERTON, JR., MARGARET BRENT HIGH SCHOOL, LEONARDTOWN, MD.; LOUIS GUY KNOTT, MARGARET BRENT HIGH SCHOOL, LEONARDTOWN, MD.; MARY ROSE PAYNE, LEONARDTOWN HIGH SCHOOL, LEONARDTOWN, MD.; AND MARIAN PILKERTON, LEONARDTOWN HIGH SCHOOL, LEONARDTOWN, MD.

Mr. PILKERTON. Mr. Chairman, my name is Norman A. Pilkerton, Jr., student at Margaret Brent High School, St. Mary's County, Leonardtown, Md.

I would like to introduce at this time Miss Mary Rose Payne, a student at Leonardtown High, Leonardtown, Md. Also Miss Marian Pilkerton, a student of Leonardtown High in Leonardtown, Md. And also Louis Knott, a student at Margaret Brent High School to which I go in St. Mary's County, Md.

Mr. LANDRUM. We are glad to have all four of you young citizens with us. We will be glad to hear what you have to say.

Mr. PILKERTON. Mr. Chairman, I haven't prepared any speech because today was the first time I knew about coming up here. But I would like to say a few words about the library situation.

In Maryland there are only 15 bookmobiles, and there are 10 counties in Maryland. So that means there is actually only about 1 bookmobile to each county. In St. Mary's County there is 1 bookmobile, and that bookmobile has to make 70 stops at all the communities and post offices. That does not give the parents enough opportunity to go and get books from the bookmobiles. That same bookmobile also has to serve 33 schools, and the students at Margaret Brent High School and Leonardtown High do not have enough chance to receive information from bookmobiles.

Now if each one of the counties had, say, 2 more bookmobiles, 1 bookmobile, for instance, to serve the schools, it would help.

In school we have certain obligations like history, for instance. He gives us homework to do, to find information on certain men. We have a library at school, but that library doesn't serve us with the information that we might need.

But if we had, say, two more bookmobiles so that one would be able to come to our school, say, once a week, we could receive the information from them so much quicker and our work would be more accurate. As it is we have to go to Leonardtown Library on the school bus or after school and get the information, and it makes our work later and it is just so inconvenient.

In the communities the parents, like a lot of them in our community and other communities, are farmers. The wives have to stay at the house to take care of the little ones, and they don't have the chance to get in a car and just run up to the library.

In our community the library is close to 10 or 15 miles away from where we live. But if we had bookmobiles to come down in our community, say, once a week, it would give the parents more opportunity to get books and read and also give the students on weekends a chance to receive books and read them.

I would like to say that if this bill was passed I believe it would be greatly welcomed by the libraries in St. Mary's County.

I thank you.

Mr. LANDRUM. Now, son, let me ask you a question or two.

What grade are you in?

Mr. PILKERTON. Junior; 11th grade.

Mr. LANDRUM. How old are you?

Mr. PILKERTON. Sixteen.

Mr. LANDRUM. You don't seem to have suffered from any lack of library facilities yourself. Your own method of expression and apparent achievements seem very good.

But certainly it is gratifying to men in the position that we on this committee and other Members of Congress find ourselves to know of young citizens like you and your associates interested in these things, and I compliment you for that fine statement.

If those with you have any statement they care to make, we would be glad to hear them.

Mr. KNOTT. Mr. Chairman, I feel that we would be very grateful if we did have such facilities as Norman just mentioned, and it would be gratefully welcomed in our county.

That is all I have, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LANDRUM. You girls are not going to let them do all the talking, are you?

Miss PAYNE. I have to go to the library often for many things for homework, and we do have some facilities in school for looking up our homework, but we need many more. Like on important men: we would have to get those from the library if we wanted them in Leonardtown, and it puts us to so much inconvenience if we do have to go to Leonardtown.

Miss PILKERTON. I haven't much else to say except it would be greatly welcomed down there.

Mr. LANDRUM. Mr. Metcalf. Do you have any questions?

Mr. METCALF. My only regret is that the full committee did not have the benefit of having these young people before it to hear what some of our younger citizens are able to do, and hear the testimony that has been given today, which is very persuasive, from the folks who actually need and use these books.

Mr. LANDRUM. We are delighted to have had all four of you. Mr. HUSSEY. Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the record at this time the statement of Mrs. Dean Johnson of Buckhannon, W. Va., and request permission to have it inserted in the record. Mr. LANDRUM. Without objection, that may be inserted in the record. (The statement referred to follows:)

STATEMENT OF MRS. DEAN JOHNSON, BUCKHANNON, W. Va.

I am Mrs. Dean Johnson, the wife and daughter of dairy farmers and I have lived all my life on a farm with the exception of 2 years spent in a small town in New York. I spend a great deal of time working with rural youth as a 4-H leader, and with rural women on county and State levels.

Our farm is situated on the edge of a town, population near 7,000, and the home of West Virginia Wesleyan College. We have two high schools, a city division and a county unit located in a suburb of the town, neither of which has an adequate library. The library of the county division does not have any place for the students to sit down and read a newspaper, magazine or book other than tables placed in the hallway through which the students must pass. A city library, financed by a city levy, is very generous in loans to rural people. The town, which is a county seat, is situated in one end of the county and many of my rural friends are 20 miles from library service.

Upshur County and five surrounding counties, with less library service, held a joint meeting of county representatives of many organizations to try and establish a bookmobile service for the area. As of today, only 2 of the 6 counties have been financially able to have a survey of the county made. We feel the rural families have the right to the same advantages as the urban dwellers.

Farm living and operation is far from the simple day-to-day life we enjoyed when I was a girl. It has become a very complex way of life. A machine purchased today may be obsolete in a few months; a method of farming used last year may be behind the times today. Knowing when to market a product may mean the difference between a loss or a profit. Books about production, marketing, home management, and child guidance have become a necessity. Rural people cannot invest $5 to $6 per book for the enjoyment of only one family. Should the cost be spread between many families reading the same books, the investment is justified. Where there is no library service available, rural people do not have access to these books.

The rural homemaker, through home demonstration clubs throughout the country, has improved her homemaking practices, but here also horizons have broadened out and we now find our programs include current affairs with a general cultured reading program.

Mechanization of farms increases production and eases the labor burden, but it also decreases the number of people needed to farm our productive acres. With rural population increasing, the surplus laborers must find employment in industry, competing with people who have had opportunities to enjoy books from city libraries.

A schoolteacher in our State found one family of children with a marked reading block. As she had little time to spend with them in school, she tried