Address By Commissioner Of Education Earl McGrath, American Public Education, Jewish Education and International Understanding
Images (17)
Document
| id |
id
73982621
|
|---|---|
| contentType |
contentType
document
|
| source |
source
import
|
Source image fields (6)
Extracted text
OCR Page 1 of 17AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION, JEWISH EDUCATION
AND
INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING *
I should like tonight to discuss certain features of Americen
education, and the relationships between them and world peace and
prosperity. In doing so, I shall attempt to show by implication
and by direct reference the place of Jewish education in our own
culture and in the united world of national families which I should
hope some day might be established.
The most characteristic feature of American society is, and
has been from the beginning of our national life, our faith in
education. As De Toqueville put it over a hundred years ago, "it
is by the attention it pays to public education that the original
character of Americen civilization is at once placed in the clearest
light. One of his countrymen, the celebrated historian and critic,
Ernest Renan, some years later when public education was being
repidly extended in this country took a very critical view of the
consequences of our educational practices. He expressed the view
that "countries which, like the United States, have set up a con-
siderable popular instruction without any serious higher education,
will long have to expiate their error by their intellectual medi-
ocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit,
their failure in general intelligence." But Americans have continued
to believe in their original conviction that the widest possible
*Address delivered by Dr. Earl J. McGrath, U. S. Commissioner of
Education before Annual Meeting of American Association for Jewish
Education - May 28, 1949, Atlantic City, N. J. Appeared in
Jewish Education, Winter 1949.
Relations
belongs_to