Address By Commissioner Of Education Earl McGrath, National Defense and the Mission of Education

NATIONAL DEFENSE AND THE MISSION OF EDUCATION* I appreciate the honor you have paid me by inviting me to meet with the membership of the Teachers College Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa. For seventeen years it has been my privilege to be a member of this fraternity. During this time I have met members from many of its chapters and I have observed in their lives the influence- of the fraternity motivating them toward the ideals of research, service and leadership within the profession. It would be pleasant in this connection to dwell upon the distinguished records of the Phi Delta Kappa graduates of Teachers College. In every type of education throughout the Nation these graduates fill distinguished positions of responsibility. Though I am not a member of this Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa it is a personal privilege to count among my friends many of these outstanding leaders of the profession. It would be natural and easy to use the ideals of research, service, and leadership as the framework within which to develop my remarks. In doing so it would be possible to show how each of the members of this fraternity has a responsibility in his own special branch of professional activity to promote these three objectives. For example, everyone will recognize at once that there are great gaps in our knowledge today concerning all aspects of education. These gaps can only be filled by the persistent and expanded re- search activities of scholars. Some of you are now devoting a major part of your professional life to these research activities and will continue to do so throughout your lives. Some of you will, on the other hand; by force of circumstances be engaged primarily in teach- ing which does not involve research activities, or in administrative work which regrettably takes many far away from the basic sources of knowledge. One of the great problems of American education today, with its enormous size and its complicated machinery, is the in- creasing difficulty for those who direct educational enterprises to keep themselves in touch with the best knowledge being produced by investigators. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the quality of the leadership of American education will be determined to a large degree by the progress we make in arranging the administrator's pro- fessional life in such a way as to provide for the periodic, if not constant, refreshment of his professional knowledge and his intel- lectual vitality. Unless we do this the urgent pressures of daily professional life tend to absorb our time and intellectual energy in routine and miscellaneous activities. Thus we are prevented from observing the over-all development of education and giving it in- telligent direction based on sound knowledge. It would be possible in the time I have at my disposal to talk about these three ideals of the fraternity in terms of the various types of professional activities represented by the individuals in this group. But after discussing a possible topic for this evening with the Dean and several members of the faculty, I decided to try to focus our attention on the responsibilities we all have for service in its larger sense. That is, I want to talk not about the kinds of services >any particular individual might render in connection with By Earl James McGrath, U. 8. Commissioner of Education, Federal Security Agency, Washington, D. c., at Spring Initiation Banquet of Beta Chapter, Phi Delta Kappa, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y., April 16, 1951. Published in part in College and University Business, Vol. 10, No May 1951, p. 17. Published in part in The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2 November 1957 n. 149.