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Religious controversy was avoided partly because the bill offers only indirect aid to parochial schools and because much of this aid benefits poor children—a feature difficult to attack. But parochial schools were also included in the wide-open Title III, which particularly pleases Catholic educators since it constitutes a sharp thrust toward broadly based general aid. To a great extent, this was made possible by the ecumenical trend in the U.S. today, which has eased religious tensions. (President Kennedy had hobbled himself with a self-imposed difficulty: his determination to do nothing that might be interpreted as pro-Catholic.) There still are practical religious problems to be worked out in shared-time programs. Asks Sam Hamerman, a Los Angeles public-school official: "Will the nuns appear in their habits in public-school classes? Will the parochial children be kept together or split up in public-school classes?" Undoubtedly there are many court tests ahead, but Washington is confident that little will come of them.
The U.S. faces a new age of education. On even the simplest levels of life, learning is the key to survival; standing on the edge of space, witnessing the dizzying extension of the human brain by the computer, Americans more than ever require an extension of knowledge and the right kind of learning. The new education bill does not by itself provide this. It does not contain an ideology of education and would have neither shocked nor necessarily cheered educators from Horace Mann to John Dewey. It does not and cannot answer the question of what shape U.S. education should take in the wake of its long era of permissiveness and mass-production methods; but it does greatly stimulate the search for answers. In short, if it does not guarantee excellence, it promises improvement. And it begins to fulfill the goal set forth in the 1830s by Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who said: "We must teach our citizens to dread ignorance more than they dread taxation."