Once we considered education a public expense; we know now that it is a public investment.

We must smooth the transition from school to work.

The chance to learn is their brightest hope and must command our full determination.

You represent a great idea: the idea of international educational opportunity.

We are engaged in a great national effort to lift the blight of bad housing, poor education, and unemployment from our cities.

Everything I want to work for, as your President, to achieve peace, to conquer poverty, to build a worthy civilization--all of these depend in a very large degree on what happens in this school and what happens in other schools throughout our land.

Nothing--nothing at all--matters more than trained intelligence.

If our schools and our students succeed, we will succeed.

That is why we invest more in education than in any other enterprise in this country, except our national defense.

If your education falters or fails, everything else that we attempt as a Nation will fail.

Secretary Gardner flew down to visit me yesterday afternoon and we spent some time reviewing various plans and proposals in the area of health, education, and welfare.

You are helping build a better life for all men based on education and on progress in science and the arts.

I want to pay a special tribute to one of the greatest Cabinet officers of all time-even if he is a Republican--John Gardner, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

I should like for this period of the 20th century to be remembered as the period when we produced more food to feed more people--because food is the necessary sustaining ingredient for all the other things-the period when we spent more money and more effort on educating more people; the period when we spent more time and more dollars on providing health for our bodies; the time when we did more planning and added more acres for conservation, recreation and beautification.

I think that as a result of this meeting and the work that they have already done, the legislation we have already passed, that not only will many thousands of young people be attending college who otherwise would not have been able to attend, but we will further strengthen our free enterprise system.

Under this new loan program, families will finance college education for their children in the same way that they finance the purchase of a home: through long-term, federally guaranteed private loans.

I pay tribute to the bankers of America who have given their Government a lending hand and have extended it also to those coming young men and women who need an education and who, when they get it, will reward us all with their increased knowledge and with their support of the finest governmental system in all the world.

I think that you will find that the historians will record that you lived in a period when we made greater progress in health, education, conservation, and development throughout the world than in any similar period in history.