NEWS CONFERENCE 507

Measurable investment and improvement in vocational-technical,
compensatory, and continuing education are weights that count,
weights that are essential to a balanced educational system.

Finally, as a collective action group, the Maryland Congress of
Parents and Teachers can add a significant and substantial weight to
the scale, the weight of responsible influence. Your support of new
educational patterns, priorities and programs is imperative. State and
local governments, like individual households, must survive on bal-
anced budgets, rely on limited resources. We cannot afford to invest
in everything, everywhere. Reality curtails our appetites. The fiscal
reform program, which produced tremendous dollar investment in
our school system, also produced public fury and protest. If we are
to continue to maintain, expand and innovate, you — individually
and collectively — will have to assist your elected officials. You can be
our finest ambassadors. Our pace of progress depends upon you. Un-
til educators, community leaders and civic interest groups can create
a genuine understanding and acceptance of all the new directions in
education, students will remain unfulfilled, parents frustrated and
politicians hesitant to act.

We cannot afford to temporize or be timid, to postpone or pro-
crastinate. Education is our surest instrument to guarantee individual
fulfillment. Education is our ultimate instrument to assure social and
economic progress. Education is the only inheritance we can bestow
upon our children that no adversity, excepting death itself, can de-
stroy. Our future as individuals, as a State, and as a nation is totally
dependent upon our educational system. Our progress as a people
will be no swifter than our progress in education, for the human mind
is our fundamental resource.

As we view the present precarious balance upon which our future
as a nation, as a civilization dedicated to freedom and justice, rests,
it becomes dramatically apparent that — above all — education is the
weight that counts.

NEWS CONFERENCE

November 8, 1967

OPENING STATEMENT BY THE GOVERNOR

I would like to extend my personal congratulations to Mayor-elect
D'Alesandro on the decisive victory that was his last night and to as-
sure him publicly of the support of the State administration. We con-