Statement by Commissioner of Education Earl James McGrath, Free Inquiry, Open Discussion

FREE INQUIRY, OPEN DISCUSSION * The future well-being of our country will be largely determined by the ability of teachers to cultivate in American youth qualities of imagination and intellectual resourcefulness. It is these qualities which we need if, through invention and technological development, we are to maintain our high level of production. Our material well-being, and our capacity to meet the menace of communism, can be sustained only by the highest type of inventive thinking in industry, commerce, engineering, farming, and the other basic productive activities of our economy. The solution of our domestic and international social problems likewise will require imaginative thinking among our leaders and intelligent understanding among our people generally. These qualities can be cultivated only in classrooms in which children are given an opportunity to develop their critical intellectual faculties by exercising them. The atmosphere must be one of free inquiry and open discussion appropriate to the level of development of the student. These qualities are not cultivated by mechanical questioning and response, or memo-riter learning. * By Earl J. McGrath, U.S. Commissioner of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, published in THE CHRISTLAN SCIENCE MONITOR, Boston, Mass., Saturday, April 18, 1953.