Eisenhower’s Open Letter to America’s Students

In his responses to students’ letters, Eisenhower encouraged them to stay in school and train their minds. (Biba Kayewich)

Every once in a while, those who love books will stumble across some passage or new idea they’ve never heard of. As they’re drawn more deeply into the text, absorbing the words and sentences with growing excitement, these readers may, for a fleeting moment, feel the ecstasy of an explorer who has discovered some vine-swallowed temple in the heart of a jungle.

This knock-your-socks-off episode can happen anywhere and at any time. Sometimes, the cause can be as trite and silly as a life hack read online, such as disinfecting Legos by putting them in a small netted laundry bag and running them through the dishwasher. On other occasions, a poem can rise from print and page like a heartbreaking aria, summoning up some slumbering grief that leaves the reader weeping in front of a baffled grandchild. And sometimes, these newly encountered words can arrive as wisdom from the past, burning with relevance for the present.

Dwight Eisenhower’s 1948 “An Open Letter to America’s Students” fits this last category.

In his responses to students’ letters, Eisenhower encouraged them to stay in school and train their minds. (Biba Kayewich)

A Bit About the Man

Today, we remember Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969), nicknamed “Ike,” as one of the most influential generals in U.S. history and as the architect of the D-Day invasion in Normandy. From 1953 to 1961, he served two terms as president, ushering our country through the early stages of the Cold War, bringing the Korean War to a halt, introducing our interstate highway system, and riding the economic boom that followed World War II. Many also remember him for his farewell address from the Oval Office, when he warned against the potential dangers of a growing “military-industrial complex.”

And though he served from 1948 to 1953 as president of Columbia University, few regarded him as an educator or an intellectual. He was known instead for his love of golf, cards, and novels about the Old West. In the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956, his detractors drew a sharp contrast between him and his opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, a gifted speaker adored by that era’s liberals for his intellectual gifts.

Yet Eisenhower’s critics overlooked his upbringing in Abilene, Kansas, where he would have known many men and women who had lived in the rough-and-tumble days of the Old West. That adolescence marked him forever as an American patriot. They also missed his lifelong love and study of history. After leaving the White House, for example, he and his wife, Mamie, settled on a farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in part because of his fascination with the Civil War.

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Nevertheless, Eisenhower is not a man most of us would consider important with regard to education. And yet, in the October 1948 Reader’s Digest, there appeared his letter to American students that should be read by every student and every teacher, parent, and mentor living today.

Red Flags for the Young and the Old

Eisenhower begins his open letter by relating that he receives many letters from young people asking: “Shall I keep on with school? Or shall I plunge right off into ‘life’?” He sets out immediately to make his case that “you should continue your schooling—if you can—right to the end of high school and right to the end of college.” He points out, as did many of his contemporaries, that “the business of living is far more complex” than it was in his boyhood.

He also issues the first of several warnings to his audience of young people. One of these has come to maturity in our own time. He writes, “If your generation fails to understand that the human individual is still the centre of the universe and is still the sole reason for the existence of man-made institutions, then complexity will become chaos.” Today, many Americans feel ignored or diminished by their own government, lost in the chaos of our culture.

A bit later, Eisenhower reinforces this view when he writes of the dangers of allowing the government “to take over a question that properly belongs to us.” The core of Americanism, he contends, is “individual liberty founded on individual responsibility, equality before the law, and a system of private enterprise that aims at reward according to merit.” He adds that time in school will help the young “apply these truths to the business of living in a free democracy.”

Yet we have allowed the government, corporations, and particularly our schools to teach the reverse of these ideas, creating a culture of victimhood that belies responsibility, courts in which equality often goes missing, and businesses that practice “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rather than recognizing talent and merit.

“Yours is a country of free men and women,” Eisenhower writes, “where personal liberty is cherished as a fundamental right. But the price of its continued possession is untiring alertness. Liberty is easily lost.” Many Americans today from across the political spectrum are pessimistic about the future of their American freedoms, believing that the government, Big Tech, and corporate media are busy trying to keep them from exercising these inalienable rights.

What We Should Be Teaching

Eisenhower specifically mentions “a moving letter” he got from a young girl halfway through high school who feels like a failure in her studies but who writes, “I still think I could learn to be a good American.”

Eisenhower reassures her that she will succeed in this ambition by staying in school. First, he briefly argues for what was once accepted as a given in education: that school “should train you in the two great basic tools of the mind: the use of words and the use of numbers.” Like millions of other older Americans, I grew up in a time when reading, writing, and math were the first causes of education. No one other than a few radical theorists would have argued otherwise.

Today, that concept has been dethroned. Instead, many of our schools push social and cultural change as their primary goals.

Equally important to Eisenhower is the study of American history. Given today’s disgraceful national test scores on American history, Eisenhower’s emphasis takes on new urgency. By studying their nation’s history, he tells these young people, you get a “sharper comprehension of your own role as an American.” He writes, “To develop fully your own character you must know your country’s character.” Two paragraphs later, he adds, “Never forget that self-interest and patriotism go together.”

This last brings up a point I’ve never read anywhere else. Here, Eisenhower contends that students who learn history and the character of America acquire a tool of freedom and self-governance that can guide them through life. If, as Eisenhower writes, “our true strength ... is in the inquisitive, inventive, indominable souls of our people,” then to study those people should lead us to emulate them.

Let’s Listen to Ike

In his “Open Letter,” Eisenhower sets admirable and traditional goals for American education. To read and write, to cipher, and to know the basic history of our republic should be the point of elementary and secondary school learning. Readers who have children and grandchildren and who also know of the ongoing and widespread failures of so many schools, particularly in our larger cities, are right to view the future of their young people with trepidation.

We can’t go back to the days of 1948, nor should we wish to do so, but Eisenhower’s thoughts on education and its importance for our national health are as applicable today as they were 75 years ago. In urging the young to get an education and to “try to learn the ‘why’” of their country, he reminds them and us that “to assure each citizen his unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was the ‘why’ behind the establishment of this Republic and is today the ‘why’ for its continued existence.”

That’s the goal.