Education: Home of the Brave

• Share

Having proclaimed last week as American Education Week, President Eisenhower got off a few thoughts on intellectual freedom at his press conference. A reporter asked whether he would care to comment on "the anti-intellectual trend in our country which expresses itself in hostility to new ideas or different ideas or even traditional ideas." Without even bothering to brush aside the reporter's premise, the President said that he was against only one idea—the idea that a nation can shut off ideas and grow strong.

People, said he, should dare to examine any philosophy preaching any doctrine short of the violent overthrow of the Government. If they were afraid of ideas, they were obviously afraid of themselves.