The President's Remarks to Educational Leaders Upon Being Honored for His Contributions in the Field of Education.

Dr. Cart, ladies and gentlemen:

There is not much that I can or should say after those beautiful remarks.

When I was a boy growing up, my mother frequently had all the children around the family table make pronouncements about what they wanted to be in life--what they wanted to grow up to be. It was very apparent to me, even at that early age, that mother wanted me to be a teacher or a preacher or a public servant.

Both of my parents had been teachers. My grandfather and great-grandfather had been teachers. So I guess that early training led me into a teachers' college where I tried to prepare myself for the work that was ahead.

I enjoyed at least a few semesters in the college classroom with freshmen government students, in the high school where I acted as the principal, in the high school where I was the head of a department, and in the grade school that I really enjoyed most, where I worked with the poor Mexican children.

I had inculcated in me at a very early age the very great importance of education, not only to our lives and to the happiness that we all sought and the advancement that we all desired, but the safety of our very system of government. Because it doesn't make much difference how much brawn we have; if we don't balance it with brains, we will enjoy a certain insecurity.

The great President of our Republic of Texas, who emigrated there from Georgia, once said that education was "the guardian genius of democracy." I have always felt that that was literally true; that if we are to guard and to be good trustees of this system of government, that while we are one of the youngest countries, we have one of the oldest systems of government--it has survived almost 200 years--we must have education.

I am very fearful that our efforts in that direction have been too minimal. They have been rather pathetic. You have had to have a good deal of charity in your heart to even belong to the teaching profession. We have shared relatively little of our resources and our wealth with the system of education which we rely on to protect our system of government.

We have tried to do something these last few years, and maybe have done some things--and I thank you, Doctor, for observing it--but we haven't even begun what needs to be done.

I was looking at a statement of the Secretary of the Interior this morning about the oil companies not believing in the oil shale development process enough to really make adequate bids on oil shale out in parts of our Country.

I thought that if we could just take these resources, and all the other resources that are yet undeveloped, and somehow or other commit them to an education fund, how wonderful it would be.

We are not taking enough of our resources, of our gross national product, and committing it to the improvement of our minds, to the training of our children, to the preparation of our future citizens.

In elementary education, we passed the first bill in that field, but we are funding less than half of what the Congress has already committed and already authorized. I am not really proud of that. Although we are spending more than twice as much for education and health as we were just 5 years ago, that is moving along at a rapid clip, but not rapid enough.

So perhaps the country will look at their children--their "jewels"--and agree that we ought to do more. That is what I hope they will agree to.

I am going home to really do three things, and only three things. They have me building empires, sailing ships, flying planes, leading astronauts, and everything else. But I am just not going to do any of those things. And I am not going to retire, either.

The first thing I am going to do is to enjoy being lazy and enjoy being with Lady Bird for a while. She will get tired of me--before very long--all of the time. But we are going to sleep late and not be worried about what may be said here or there. We will just take things easy.

Then the next thing I am going to do is just read, read, read, and read. I have enough books from Christmas--I got seven volumes last night on George Washington. And I would feel better this morning if I hadn't plowed through one of them as long as I did; but he had some of the same feelings about the Presidency that I have, and you like to find a fellow who agrees with you. So I am going to read.

Then when I get through reading, I hope to be able to do some writing and some teaching. Next year I am going to make relatively few appearances--six or seven--two or three at the University, Rice Institute, San Marcos, and maybe one or two up in this area.

But a great deal of my time is going to be spent with young people. And I am going to try to inspire them, and stimulate and create in them a desire to be teachers or preachers or public servants, because I think that you can get a satisfaction in those endeavors that you can't find in many others.

I am so grateful to you for this very generous and very thoughtful act. I am not responsible for what has been done nearly as much as you people who have come here and knocked down the doors, twisted the arms, and tried to help us bring these programs to reality.

But I will be with you in spirit and in deed, too, in the days ahead, in trying to make our commitments secure and increase them.

Thank you a lot.

And now I am going to run, because I am told I have less than two minutes until the splashdown. But when we think about our boys in Cambodian prisons coming home, the Pueblo crew being released, and the Apollo men just short of the culmination of our dreams, the economy where we are, and all that has happened to us this Christmas, we Americans ought to quit this business of just going around talking about everything being wrong, because so many wonderful things have come to us that we ought to count our blessings and be thankful for them and for each other--and I am for you teachers.