THE ADMINISTRATION: Goals to Go

In the 1960s every American is summoned to extraordinary personal responsibility, sustained effort and sacrifice. For the nation is in grave danger, threatened by the rulers of one-third of mankind, for whom the state is everything, the individual significant only as he serves the state.

Thus the President's Commission on National Goals this week put a challenge to the U.S. in the bluntest terms to come out of an official document in the Eisenhower Administration. Established by President Eisenhower last February, the commission, headed by Henry M. Wriston, president-emeritus of Brown University,† had as its charter the development of a "broad outline of national objectives and programs for the next decade and longer." The Wriston Report not only fulfills that requirement but details some hard specifics and boldface imperatives. Items:

Equality. Religious prejudice and racial discrimination are "economically wasteful, and in many respects dangerous." Equal opportunities and rights, "the core of our system," require action at all levels. "Municipal, state and federal legislation is essential." The report urged that 1) federal funds should be denied those who discriminate on basis of race, 2) discrimination in higher education should be entirely eliminated by 1970, and 3) "every state must make progress in good faith toward desegregation of publicly supported schools."

Education. "Within the next decade at least two-thirds of the youth in every state should complete twelve years of schooling and at least one-third enter college." Small and inefficient school districts should be consolidated, reducing the total number from 40,000 to about 10,000. Teachers' salaries must be improved, graduate school capacity doubled, public and private expenditures doubled (to $40 million), federal spending increased from $24.9 billion to $33 billion a year.

Arts & Sciences. "Knowledge and innovation must be advanced on every front . . . We should be highly selective in our space objectives and unexcelled in their pursuit. Prestige arises from sound accomplishment, not from the merely spectacular . . . In the eyes of posterity, the success of the U.S. as a civilized society will be largely judged by the creative activities of its citizens in art, architecture, literature, music and the sciences . . . Our society must stimulate and support richer cultural fulfillment . . . Thus far, television has failed to use its facilities adequately for educational and cultural purposes, and reform in its performance is urgent."