Address by United States Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath

ADDRESS * These four winners of the Voice of Democracy Contest conducted in the high schools of the Nation are part of the greatest educational experiment in the history of the world. Our founding fathers knew that the kind of democratic and free society they had conceived could only be sustained through the ages as President Washington phrased the thought, by the general dissemination of knowledge among the people. They knew that without enlightenment a democratic society would be vulnerable to attack from enemies outside its borders and from within from those who did not understand its nature. They knew, therefore, that the best protection against both was to be found in the elimination of ignorance through equal educational opportunity for all. Though we have not yet realized this idealistic goal, we have come nearer to doing so than any other people in history. And we continue to move forward. Today only a small percentage of American youth of high school age are not in a secondary school. This constant increase in educational opportunity is in large measure the cause of our material well-being, the growth of our industry and commerce under the free enterprise system, the increasing health of our people, our enormous national wealth with a high standard of living, and our general strength in times of peace and of war. But more importantly for the future of our country, and indeed for the future of all free nations of the world, educational opportunity has strengthened and preserved our Nation by giving all our children an understanding of the social, the moral, and the spiritual basis of democratic society. * By Earl J. McGrath, U. S. Commissioner of Education, Federal Security Agency, Washington, D. C., at the Voice of Democracy luncheon, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D. C., February 18, 1953.