Remarks to a Group of Foreign Exchange Teachers

Commissioner Howe, my fellow teachers from around the world, ladies and gentlemen:

Welcoming you to the White House this morning is the first item on my schedule for this very busy day--and rightly so, I think. Because this house and this Nation could really have no more important visitors come here. I could have no more important duty, in my judgment, today than to have this opportunity and obligation to speak to you-and to the brilliant young Central American musicians who are also with us today--about our common purpose, which is to overcome discord and hate; to make this world a little richer in understanding; to make our people a little better.

Fifty or a hundred years ago, distance and strangeness would have made a meeting such as this one impossible. But today, Austria and India, Australia and New Zealand, Sweden and the other countries that you represent happen to be just a few hours out yonder.

The jet has made near neighbors of the world's nations; the supersonic transport in a few years will pull us even closer together. But it will do little good for nations to be only hours apart geographically, if they should remain light-years apart in understanding.

That is why you are here--bringing to 10,126 the number of persons we have exchanged under this program in the past two decades.

That is why our Nation has begun the largest experiment in history in international education.

Almost a year ago at the Smithsonian Institution I called for major new efforts in educational cooperation. I hope that they will be able to give some of you a copy of that statement, if they have not already done so.
Since that time:

--we have requested from Congress an increase of more than 50 percent in education programs for the developing countries;

--we have instructed our diplomats and AID officials around the world that educational cooperation is number one top-priority;

--we have called on our Congress to establish an Exchange Peace Corps, and a new Center for Educational Cooperation in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

The first thing I did this morning was to talk to a lady about building a model high school to serve as an experiment and a model for this Nation, and for all the nations of the world, in how to help deaf people get a high school education.

I just finished talking to one of the experienced reporters, a friend of mine, about my 58th birthday day after tomorrow. I don't know how they snooped around and found out I was that old, but they have.

He asked me what I was going to get for my birthday present. I told him I already had my birthday present. I will have a most wonderful birthday because we have had the birthday of the elementary, secondary, and higher education acts; that we had passed more than 20 health bills; that we had a beautification program; a conservation program; a poverty program; and that our foreign policy was our domestic policy. Domestically, we are dealing with the enemies of man.

What are those enemies? Disease. It is tragic the toll that old man Disease takes-and ignorance and poverty.

A few nights ago I dedicated hospital number 6,600 that we had built up at Ellenville, New York. That morning I had been in Buffalo where we are putting our pollution reorganization and our pollution legislation into effect.

We went down to Syracuse. We talked about what we were going to do with our demonstration cities program and what we are going to do with our urban renewal; what we are going to do with our new housing legislation and what we are going to do with our supplemental rents.

So I have had education, health, housing, and poverty programs already given to me as a birthday present, because we are applying those programs all over this land. In the last 2 1/2 years this Congress has passed more legislation in those fields than all the Congresses in history put together. What better birthday present could you have than the satisfaction of knowing that the instrument of government is being used to guide and to lead and to lift all of our people out of the slough and despond of decay and poverty and disease and illiteracy and ignorance in which we found ourselves?

Now if we do this for our own people, we also want to see other people in the world have the same thing.

And so for that reason we are also trying to weave into our AID programs, exchanges, education, Peace Corps missions, so that we can say this is what we stand for at home and throughout the world. We want a Nation of 200 million who are educated, enlightened, free of disease, and who have conquered cancer and heart disease, and have hospitals and Medicare and all those things.

But, we also want a world of 3 billion that will ultimately attain it, because when we do these things, we will wipe out the ills that cause riots, that cause wars, and that cause anarchy. That is what we are trying to do in this land.

Not long ago our House of Representatives passed the international education act, which will help our schools and colleges build bridges to your countries to carry out the things that I have mentioned here this morning. That measure is now awaiting action in the Senate.

I am doing my utmost--and I want to put in a plug here--to encourage action on that international education bill in the Senate. I believe the outlook is bright.

Now why are we making all these efforts?

Not only because we think education and world cooperation are necessary to a decent life for all human beings, but we believe these efforts can mean the difference, the important difference, between living at peace and living at war.

I have lived long enough to know that a peaceful world will not come through some final summit conference, through the dramatic feats of some statesmen, or the eloquence of some orator. Peace will come, I believe, when men everywhere learn, slowly and painfully perhaps, that more is to be gained from cooperation than from conflict. Peace will come not suddenly, like a lightning flash--but it will come slowly and steadily, like the light of day.

The work you are doing as exchange teachers in America will help to bring that light.

Four thousand years ago it was boasted that "We have thrown open our city to the world; we never . . . exclude visitors from any opportunity of learning or observing..."

Well, in our age we have thrown open our Nation to the world. America welcomes the world with open arms because we believe that learning and observing and teaching are among man's noblest and most hopeful works.

Because you are here to advance those works, I came here this morning to thank you for that effort and to salute you for the assignment that you have and the undertaking that is yours. I welcome you and I wish you a great year among our people, because you, and those like you, in my judgment, hold the future of humankind in your hands.

If you are successful in helping us to banish poverty and illiteracy and ignorance and disease and pollution and filthy air and filthy streams from the world, you will banish war from the world.

Think about what a great satisfaction it will be to you or to your children or your children's children to recognize that you participated in an effort that got away from the necessity of man killing man, from disease eating up man, or from ignorance and discrimination and bigotry destroying man to the day when there can be rose gardens like this throughout the world. And the educated minds can become the guardians of democracy.

We will put our swords over the door or under the bed and we will come and reason together and enjoy the bounty of our efforts.

I commend you for having enlisted, I hope, for the duration.

Thank you very much.