Address by Commissioner of Education Earl McGrath, Education For International Understanding

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EDUCATION FOR INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING* In May of 1949, shortly after I had assumed the office of United States Commissioner of Education, I was privileged to address the Joint Conference on Jewish Education in Atlantic City. At that time, I took occasion to discuss certain current problems in our school system, particularly the inequalities of educational opportunity found at all levels of education. Large numbers of our children and youth, I reported then, are deprived of their educational birthright for reasons of race, creed, national origin, family economic hardship, or the inability of many communities to provide adequate funds for the education of their children. Such limitations on the schooling of American youth strike at the very foundations of the democratic belief that every individual should have an opportunity to realize his natural potentialities for his own good and for the maximum benefit to society. Moreover when democracy is on trial in many areas of the world the existence of barriers to opportunity in the schools and colleges of this country jeopardizes our position in the ideological conflict which now engulfs the entire globe. America's most pressing educational problems, I said in the #Address prepared by Earl J. McGrath, U.S. Commissioner of Education, Federal Security Agency, Washington, D. C., and delivered by Buell G. Gallagher, at the Annual Jewish Education Dinner of the Board of Jewish Education, Sherman Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, 6:30 p.m. December 17, 1950.