Remarks by United States Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath

Remarks* "For the first time in our history,' Commissioner Earl J. McGrath told me, "Congress has a body of reliable information on how serious our school housing shortage is." "I'm not interested in a large bureaucratic organization, Dr. McGrath says. "I'm not interested in haboring specialists who will spend all their days on some minute technical question. I'm not interested in assembling a staff that would try to tell teachers and administrators how to do their job. I'm hoping that we shall soon develop a sense of teamwork here which will lead us to concentrate on the structure and quality of American education as a whole.' As far as his own job is concerned, Dr. McGrath believes it should consist primarily of telling the American people about the needs of education. "I think it's my job to tell the people of the damage that is being done to the Nation because qualified young men and women are kept out of college because of either economic or racial factors. I think it's my job to alert both educators and the public to the tremendous urgency for utilizing the educational TV channels. I think it's my job to point out that 60,000,000 adults need new kinds of education to help them live in these fast changing days." Censhorship? Do Dr. McGrath's superiors in the Federal Security Agency require him to go down the agency line? "You can say that no prohibitions are placed on the U. S. Commissioner of Education, Dr. McGrath said. "I say anything I want on any occásion.' By Earl J. McGrath, U. S. Commissioner of Education, Federal Security Agency, Washington, D. C. as appeared in "New Opportunities for the U.S. Office of Education" by B. P.Brodinsky, Nation's Schools, Sept. 1952.