Rear Admiral GENE LaROCQUE, US Navy (Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
Senior Producer:
Sanford Gottlieb
Marketing & Operations:
Mark Sugg
Producers:
Matthew Hansen
Nick Moore
Lori McRea
Daniel Sagalyn
Interviewers:
Sanford Gottlieb and Rear Admiral GENE LaROCQUE
Program Producer:
Lori McRea
Program No.:
502
Origination:
Washington, D.C.
Initial Broadcast:
29 September 1991
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1990, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
EUGENE LANG
President, REFAC Technology Corporation
Chairman, "I Have A Dream" Foundation
EUGENE LANG: The education of Americans is the key to America's defense.
Mr. GOTTLIEB: ...but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Adlai Stevenson's words are as apt today as they were in 1952. The battlefield is usually the context in which most Americans recognize service to their country. We're justly proud of the warriors who have served their country in arms, yet many Americans have spent their lives without the experience of wars. Nonetheless, they express their patriotism in many other important ways. Occasionally, "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" will talk to these "Modern American Patriots."
Our "Modern American Patriot" today is Eugene Lang.
Admiral GENE LaROCQUE: Hello, I'm Gene LaRocque, rear admiral, United States Navy, Retired.
You know, in recent years, we've come to equate patriotism with militarism. If you're patriotic, you're assumed to be militaristic. If you're militaristic, you're assumed to be patriotic. Now we've measured our patriotism in the last several years against the backdrop of war and, surely, we're proud of the performance of our military in Iraq. They achieved the military objectives. But the question we have to ask today is who are the patriots here at home.
Eugene Lang is a successful entrepreneur and international businessman. The REFAC Corporation, which he founded, specializes in licensing the creative innovations of small businesses to worldwide markets. With the steady dedication of a lifetime, Mr. Lang has always recognized the value of innovation inspired by a solid education.
In 1981, he created the "I Have A Dream" Foundation to assist under-privileged school children to acquire the education that will make them productive members of society. I invited Mr. Lang to talk to me about his foundation. He was here in Washington to attend a charity basketball game.
Welcome, Eugene Lang, to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."
Mr. LANG: Nice to be here.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Thank you. You've been immensely successful in business. Did you as a young man have a dream of financial success?
Mr. LANG: No, I really didn't. I think my earliest ambition was to run a garbage truck.
Adm. LaROCQUE: To run a garbage truck.
Mr. LANG: And then my next ambition I think was to be a social worker. And it was actually my high school principal who talked me out of the idea of being a social worker because he told me that, while the aspiration was noble, the fact was that in these circumstances, which goes back to 1933 in the depths of the Depression, most social workers did not eat very regularly.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Yes, but you've become immensely successful in business. How did that come about? You've come a long way from your early days.
Mr. LANG: Well, I have to say that it really -- my experience in business represents an extension of the philosophy of my father, who was an immigrant to this country in 1911 and was an active, ardent socialist.
Adm. LaROCQUE: From Hungary.
Mr. LANG: From Hungary. And he came over here in 1911 because he, as a young man, decided that he would not accept the conscription into the Kaiser's army and the police were after him for distributing what were considered subversive documents. And rather than submit to authority, he got on a boat and came over here.
But he had a very interesting and I think a very true philosophy, something that only now in my later years that I realize how it's extended into my life. And while it seems overly simplistic in this modern day and age, his philosophy was the only human being that merits the dignity of the adjective "human" would be a person who was creative, someone who added something to the social condition of the community. He thought farmers who grew things, mechanics and artisans who made things, and teachers who taught human beings were really human beings. People like lawyers, bankers, accountants he classified with one word, "parasites."
Well, in a sense, today, as you look at what's happening, some of our institutions of these -- what my father would have called parasitic institutions, the condition of our savings and loan associations, the status of our banks, you'd have to say there was a lot of truth in what he said.
Adm. LaROCQUE: How are we doing in the rest of the world though, in terms of competing with the Japanese, and the Germans and the others? We take this pride in America, justifiably in most cases, but how are we really doing? Are we number one in the manufacturing, the economies of the world?
Mr. LANG: Well, I think we tend to beguile ourselves with slogans and we sort of live in a never, neverland of a tradition which never really fully existed in this country. The fact is we have lost a lot of ground because we have allowed the base of our success to erode. And that is we have forgotten that our society and the well-being of our society, and the progress of our society, and the competitive viability of our society ultimately rest on people, on individuals. And [unless] we allow the equality, the ability of our individuals to fulfill useful, creative, productive roles in the community, our entire community ultimately suffers, not only because of what these people who could do things are not doing, but by the added burden it puts on the productivity of those who are productive, the overhead it puts on, which stands against your ability to be competitive. And that, of course, can be summed-up in one word: education, or the lack of education and the eroding condition, which the lack of education is imposing on the dynamics of our economy.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Yes, well, we've hit on now something that, of course, is central to the reason I've asked you to be on our program today. You've led into it on education. Reagan's former Secretary of Education is calling for a revolution in education. George Bush wants to be the "education president." US kids are among the worst in the world in science and geography. Our physical plants in the schools are crumbling. Kids are dropping out.
Tell me, is this new? Has it always been this way? Or, is this something new in the American experience? And if so, why?
Mr. LANG: Well, you're dealing I think with a basic sociological condition which is not going to be cured, whose dynamics are not going to be shifted by slogans, by adjectives we apply to whether you're an education president or any other kind of a president. The fact is we have allowed the institutions of our society to become more institutional and where decisions are made in programmatic terms rather than individual terms. And we have forgotten that the total problem consists not of a class or a segment, it consists of every individual that's part of a group.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Are you saying that this is a new problem for us as a nation or was it always this way?
Mr. LANG: Well, at the turn of the century, only 6 percent of our young people graduated from high school. As recently as 1940, only 26 percent of our youngsters graduated from high school. Today, it may be said that 52 percent graduate from high school. We've, in effect, doubled the number of youngsters who are graduating, and I won't comment, at the moment anyway, on the quality -- academic quality that graduation today represents. But even having doubled it, we are falling behind. Why? Because the nature of our economy, the ability to fulfill a productive role in our economy, to be a viable member of society requires at least the equivalent of two years of college education.
And so, you can see how even though more youngsters are at least technically graduating from high school, we still are falling further and further behind our needs.
Mr. GOTTLIEB: Eugene Lang's commitment to education helped fulfill his own dreams and those of a new generation. In 1981, he gave a sixth grade commencement speech at New York's Public School 121, promising the entire class of children full scholar-ships to college, provided that they stay in school. This was the beginning of the "I Have A Dream" program.
He developed cultural and social activities for the students as they continued their junior and senior high school education and encouraged the development of additional "I Have A Dream" projects in cities across the nation.
Today, an initial investment of $400,000 provides funding to an entire class of children for yearly programs and their college tuition. Project sponsors spend time with students in many settings, in groups or individually. There are currently 10,000 students in 150 sponsored programs located in 41 cities.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Some would argue that what you've set up is sort of an elite cadre of people whose doors have been opened up by one Eugene Lang and all they have to do is behave themselves, keep going to school, and they then can go to college. What about the mass of the other children that are there?
Mr. LANG: Well, the premise of your question is wrong. The fact of the matter is, I don't do anything for them. I make it possible for them to do things for themselves. That's what's important. And in making it possible for them to do things for themselves, the important thing is I am helping to motivate them to want to do things for themselves. And the things they want to do they come to recognize as being significant, important and worthwhile.
Now I want to emphasize that 10,000 dreamers seems like a lot, until you measure it against the fact that each year in this country now we have some 750,000 to a million dropouts. So, we have barely scratched the problem. So, the essential significance of what we are doing is not only the relationship we have with our 10,000 dreamers, whom we have shown a way to become full, proud individuals in society, to get an education, but also we have shown that there is a way of dealing with the problem.
Adm. LaROCQUE: This may be an unfair question, but why do kids drop out of our normal, ordinary, regular secondary school programs?
Mr. LANG: Well, I guess a principal reason is -- a reason you don't do things is because you don't see any good reason to do it. And there is nobody at home, or on the street, or in the housing developments where they may live to encourage them to be what they can be.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Are you going to be able to move fast enough with "I Have A Dream" projects, the programs around the country or are you sort of shoveling against the tide?
Mr. LANG: Well, I guess there are two answers to that question. The first answer is a very easy one: It doesn't matter because it's important that we do what we can. Every child that we can help build a life itself justifies everything we can do. That's the value we place on a human life.
One of the things we've learned is the fact that nobody has the solution; all of us have the solution. Because the problem is so big that it requires all of us in the public and private sector, individually and institutionally to play a part in the process. And there is a role for everybody in the process.
And one of the things our program has shown is that establishing an "I Have A Dream" project in the community has a very significant therapy for the community because it energizes the resources of the entire community, whether it's businesses, church congregations, civic groups, whatever, to become part of it because when you have an "I Have A Dream" project, there is a role for everybody.
Mr. GOTTLIEB: In Washington, D.C. one of the "I Have A Dream" sponsors is Abe Pollin, chairman of the board of the Washington Bullets NBA basketball team.
Some of the D.C. students were in attendance recently as the Washington Bullets participated in an all-star game with NBA players to benefit the "I Have A Dream" Foundation.
STUDENT: The program just enhanced school for me and gave me a better opportunity to discover and experience more opportunities and to do more things. I always had a positive attitude about school and everything, so the program just enhanced it.
Mr. GOTTLIEB: You're persuaded it really makes a difference.
ABE POLLIN: I'm persuaded that it is the best program I've ever heard of to break the cycle of illiteracy and poverty, the best.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Should this nation begin to think about and perhaps adopt an education program which provided free college for every child who qualified and that wanted to go to college?
Mr. LANG: Well, I don't think we ought to identify the problem in institutional terms. It's not where the kid goes, it's what the kid knows, what the kid learns. I think myself that the standards that are now required at elementary school and at high school levels are abysmally low. Our standards, our qualifications for mathematics, for language, for the sciences are ridiculously low, and this is something that has been done I think purposefully to make it possible for more kids to pass through the system and show a diploma.
The fact of the matter is our school systems -- and this is even true of colleges -- don't begin, doesn't begin to take advantage of the potential, the inherent potential, the achieving ability of our children. It's quite clear that youngsters in this country, in terms of academic achievement, are far below the standards that are achieved by youngsters in other industrial countries. The thing is if we satisfy our own aspirations as a nation, if we satisfy what I think is the basic mandate of a democracy, of a free society that every child has a birthright entitlement to a genuine opportunity for a quality education, if we do that, the international situation will take care of itself.
STUDENT: I think that's the only thing that we need, is for someone to just give us that boost, you know, encouragement so we can continue, but I think that's probably it.
STUDENT: Well, before I got involved with the foundation, I thought school was -- Actually, I didn't want to be in school. But now since the foundation, it has helped me a lot.
Mr. LANG: I think one of the problems is the fact that teachers themselves no longer take pride in their vocations because how can you take pride in a situation when you feel that you can't fulfill your purpose -- namely, teaching -- when you've got to spend your time trying to enforce discipline, when you are encouraged by the standards that are set by the school to accept as excellent or as passing things which clearly are not adequate to support the purpose of the educational process for which they're responsible.
Adm. LaROCQUE: I think you're on to a very good thing here. I would suggest that military men take pride in what they're doing because they are permitted to accomplish what they set out to do. We can invade Panama, we can go to Grenada, we can conduct a successful military operation in a war with Iraq, and they have the wherewithal to do it. Doesn't it say something about the American public and our attitude generally that we are willing to give all the support necessary for the military and then short-change the education system?
Mr. LANG: Well, I think the mission of the military is a lot less complex and is much less of a thoughtful process for those whose function, whose role is to execute an order than it is for a teacher who has to deal with the problems of teaching a whole bunch of different human beings in one classroom.
Adm. LaROCQUE: What are we educating American citizens for?
Mr. LANG: I think what we are -- we really want to see every American become an educated person, proud of himself, herself, able to be a productive member of the community, able to enjoy the resources of the community in all of its aspects and able to have a dream, whatever it may be, high or low, and to feel that there is a credible opportunity to achieve it. When you have people who, due to lack of education, feel purposeless and see no hope within society, then I think they become ripe prey for dictatorial thinking.
Adm. LaROCQUE: But we're educating for democracy. We're educating for participation by individuals into our democratic process.
Mr. LANG: The only thing is that we're not educating sufficiently, and we're not educating enough people sufficiently, and the mechanism of education today doesn't function on a sufficiently broad base.
Adm. LaROCQUE: But that's what a goal must be. We have to have a goal for all this education.
Mr. LANG: Right.
Adm. LaROCQUE: And the goal is to participate as individuals in a democratic society to ensure that it stays democratic.
Mr. LANG: Look, let's not -- I think all of us quite under-stand the purpose of education. I think that if people are educated, the impact on society will come just by the natural economic and social processes that prevail in a free society.
I don't think it is our purpose to direct the ultimate expression, the use of education; that will take care of itself.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Oh, this is where I'd have to differ with you. Take a look at it from the military's point of view. We have some 1400 high schools in the United States with over 200,000 high school students enrolled in ROTC. We take 13-year olds and 14-year olds and we teach them the rudiments of military force. That's even far more people than you have in "I Have A Dream" today. How do you feel about this, to inculcating the 13 and 14-year old children with a sense of militarism?
Mr. LANG: Well, I guess, if I take a short view of things, I'd say that's good because it may be the only way and the only place where a kid can get educational opportunity. I know some of my kids, my dreamers, enlisted in the Army because they felt that was a good way for them to get an education that they were not getting in school and, also, they felt there would be the ultimate advantage of having additional resources to be able to go to college.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Some people have even suggested to me that we put sergeants and young officers as teachers in our high schools.
Mr. LANG: And one of the biggest values that the military was perhaps unconsciously responsible for was the G.I. Bill of Rights, which opened up higher education to a very, very major segment of our population.
Adm. LaROCQUE: But what you're saying, Mr. Lang, is that in order to provide money for education, we have to identify it with the United States military.
Mr. LANG: I think it's too bad that the military has to be the resource through which many people achieve their educational aspirations. I certainly feel that among the options that are open to youngsters today, where they don't see any opportunity or don't qualify for opportunities in the mainstream of society, I'd much rather see them go to the Army than become dope peddlers or resort to crime.
STUDENT: They gave me a way to go to college, and this program is alright.
Mr. LANG: I think that we can -- we should have a lot more money put into our educational plant and process. But that in itself will not solve the problem, because a lot of the money now that is going into education and in special programs is being wasted. It's being wasted. And essentially that money is support-ing bureaucracies and supporting purposes which those programs cannot, are not achieving. And in a way, we're being kidded, because every program immediately establishes a statistical basis for vindicating its efforts and to perpetuate its existence.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Well, that raises the basic issue of what are our national goals? You can't talk about the expenditure of our funds, our efforts to change or modify what is going on in this country without, at some point, saying what is it America is all about, what are our national goals. What are they to you?
Mr. LANG: Well, I think our national goal is to have a country where there is equal opportunity, not theoretically, but in reality. And the way to achieve that is to equip people to exercise their opportunities and also to believe that they exist. Everything starts with the individual.
A kid that wants to learn will learn in the worst of schools. A kid that wants to learn has all kinds of opportunities and facilities in the community to fulfill that interest. There is no question about that. And if you have the will to learn -- If the children have the will to learn, the school system will automatically improve. Nothing will be better for the morale and the productivity of teachers -- I venture to say even more important than a salary increase or shinier desks -- would be to have a classroom of kids who are eager to take advantage of the learning that the teacher wants to impart.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Well, thank you very much. Mr. Lang. I found this conversation very stimulating and I think our audience will, too.
Mr. LANG: May I say thank you. And one more thing. I think in having this kind of a dialogue, CDI is realizing its ultimate function. Because I believe the education, the educational well-being of Americans is the key to America's defense.
Adm. LaROCQUE: Thank you. I share that view. You are, in my opinion, a real modern American patriot and I think in the opinion of Americans throughout this country. Thank you very much for appearing on our program.
For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," until next time, I'm Gene LaRocque.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information.)
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