[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 16 (Tuesday, February 6, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S895-S897]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF ERNIE BOYER

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, on Sunday, January 21, 1996, over 500 
people from across the country and world, gathered at the Princeton 
University Chapel in New Jersey to share their memories of one of the 
giants of American education, Ernie Boyer, who died on December 8, 
1995.
  Ernie was a great friend to me, and many others in Congress, and a 
great champion of education. Millions of people have better lives today 
because of Ernie. I believe that the tributes given at the memorial 
service will be of interest to all of us in Congress, and I ask 
unanimous consent that the following remarks be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to printed in the 
Record, as follows:

                  Remarks by Senator Edward M. Kennedy

       Ernie once said that ``knowledge has, without question, 
     become our most precious resource.'' He believed so strongly 
     in the value and importance of knowledge that he devoted his 
     life to searching for it, sharing it with others, and 
     summoning--and sometimes even shaming--the nation to 
     guarantee that more Americans have the opportunity to achieve 
     it.
       Ernie began to quench his thirst of knowledge before most 
     children can drink from a glass. On his first day of school, 
     he walked 

[[Page S896]]
     hand-in-hand with his mother. When they reached the school, he asked, 
     ``Will I learn to read today?''
       ``No,'' his mother said, ``You won't learn to read today, 
     but you will before the year is out.''
       But Ernie was vindicated a few moments later--because on 
     that first day of school, his teacher greeted her students by 
     saying, ``Good morning class, today we learn to read.''
       Before he ever stepped into a classroom, Ernie understood 
     the urgency of obtaining an education. He mastered the art of 
     learning and embarked on a journey that has literally changed 
     the lives of millions of Americans.
       He encouraged even the greatest centers of learning to 
     remember that teaching is important too--as important as 
     research. He counseled Congress about how to improve schools, 
     and he reminded us all to value good teaching. His 
     contributions to the art and science of the effective 
     transmission of learning were unsurpassed.
       But he did not stop there. He wrestled with how best to 
     help all children come to school ready to learn. He never 
     forgot the difference it made to him that he arrived for his 
     first day of school ready to learn. And he tried to make 
     America see that difference too. If Ernie had his way, 
     everyone would have a good breakfast and a warm hand to hold 
     on their way to school.
       More than anyone of his time, he taught us that it is 
     children, not just the schools, that should be the focus of 
     our concern--that education is a community-wide effort which 
     begins with the birth of a child--that supporting education 
     is, more than any other challenge, not an expenditure, but an 
     investment--that failure to act now will surely later mean 
     higher costs, wasted lives, promises unfulfilled.
       If Paul Simon and Dick Riley and I and many others see 
     farther on these issues today, it is because we stand on the 
     shoulders of giants like Ernie Boyer.
       Ernie believed that the knowledge he gained and continued 
     to gain himself was a call to the service of others. As he 
     once said, ``there's reason for optimism--if we can get the 
     right kind of leadership to help clarify and energize what is 
     still a huge public commitment to education.''
       Ernie kept Congress on its toes. He was a constant 
     counselor and a dear friend to many of us. Long ago, those of 
     us who care about education wore out the tab in our address 
     books under ``B''.
       Ernie's greatest gift to the nation was his unwavering 
     commitment to education and to keeping all children at the 
     heart of the nation's agenda. And when Ernie said all 
     children, he meant all children, so that none would be left 
     out or left behind.
       Any time we planned a hearing on education in the Committee 
     on Labor and Human Resources and Ernie testified, he brought 
     a series of new ideas to improve schools and reach out to 
     children. He was the formative thinker behind the modern 
     movement for school reform.
       He felt the most important thing we could do for very young 
     children was to create television shows that prepare them for 
     school. Ernie had the idea, and it was one of his best. We 
     turned it into legislation, and now there is strong support 
     for improved children's television.
       He brought an endless fountain of creativity to American 
     life. His breadth of knowledge and depth of commitment to 
     education inspired awe, respect, and humility. In Ernie's 
     presence, we were learning from the master.
       Ernie believed the pursuit of knowledge was a lifelong 
     journey of profound importance to the nation. As he once 
     wrote, ``commitment to education will help all students to be 
     involved in the civic future of the nation--to vote in 
     elections to serve on juries, to be concerned about the 
     health of their communities--to ensure that democracy will, 
     with vitality, succeed.''
       Kay once told me that Ernie wished he could live to be 200, 
     because he had so many projects to complete. But he 
     accomplished more for the nation's students, parents, and 
     teachers, in his 67 years than anyone else could have done in 
     200 years. They may not know his name, but millions of 
     Americans, young and old, in every city, town, and village in 
     the nation have better lives today because of Ernie Boyer. To 
     all of us who know him and love him, he was the North, South, 
     East, and West of education. And now, education has lost its 
     best friend.
       There is an old New England saying that all men are dust, 
     but some are dust of gold. That's the way I felt about Ernie 
     Boyer.
       As the poet Stephen Spender wrote:
     I think continually of those who were truly great . . .
     The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
     Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
     Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the 
           sun,
     And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
                                                                    ____


        Remarks of Richard W. Riley, U.S. Secretary of Education

       On behalf of President and Mrs. Clinton and the American 
     people, I want to extend to Kay Boyer, her children and 
     grandchildren the many thanks of this nation for giving us 
     Dr. Ernest L. Boyer--and my personal thanks for the honor of 
     speaking at this memorial service.
       You family members knew and loved Ernie as a husband, 
     father and grandfather. We came to know, love and admire him 
     as a teacher, reformer and friend, a wonderful and cheerful 
     advocate of children and of the advancement of American 
     education.
       Ernie was, in many ways, education's best friend. He had an 
     intellectual rigor about him and a wonderful capacity to 
     speak plain English. He moved people to act. He was unwilling 
     to accept mediocrity and his body of policy recommendations--
     which span the waterfront--remain to this day the sturdy 
     foundation for our continuing efforts to improve American 
     education.
       Ernie did many things for education.
       He urged and prodded higher education to return teaching to 
     its primacy of place at the core of the college experience, 
     and he never let us forget the importance of service to the 
     learning experience.
       He reminded us, with the wonderful support of his wife Kay, 
     that an unhealthy child could not be much of a learner.
       Above all, he captured the imagination of countless parents 
     and teachers because he gave hope to the real possibility 
     that we could educate all of America's children.
       Ernie was education's own ``Mr. Fix It.'' For Ernie 
     believed in solutions--believed that with hard work, a sense 
     of optimism and unlimited energy--all problems could be 
     solved if we stayed focused on the children.
       Ernie once wrote that, ``America is losing sight of its 
     children.'' This must have been a difficult sentence for 
     Ernie to write because he never lost sight of the children. 
     And, that was one of his unique gifts--his tenacious capacity 
     to stay focused, to inspire everyone he came in contact with 
     to keep at it even when the task seemed daunting.
       For Ernie, you see, believed in excellence and knew that 
     excellence and equity went hand in hand. He did not suggest 
     to you that the connection was easy to sustain. But he was 
     not daunted.
       He told us to start early, to strengthen the connection 
     between parent and child. He urged us to fit our schools to 
     the needs of our children instead of the other way around. 
     And, then he went on to give us the blueprints for basic 
     schools of excellence and how to improve teaching--and how to 
     infuse the arts into education.
       Ernie, with his energy, wisdom and passion, conveyed to us 
     the possibility that we could get the job done--that we could 
     raise standards and make America's schools, colleges and 
     universities bastions of hope, creativity and learning.
       Ernie's mind, you see, never rested and he had an idea for 
     just about everything. Good ideas--solid ideas--forward 
     thinking ideas--positive solutions that made a difference. 
     Until his very last breath, Ernie was a worker. In a few 
     short weeks we will see the wisdom of another one of his good 
     ideas--how to reform the American high school.
       His work on this plan defines for me not only his talent 
     and foresight but, more than anything else, his quiet 
     integrity. He could have produced, as so many have before, 
     one more scathing report about America's high schools--a 
     headline grabber, to be sure, but a report that would not 
     have helped anyone.
       Instead, Doctor Boyer encouraged and supported the work of 
     this nation's high school principals and teachers in their 
     effort to find concrete examples of what is working and what 
     is not. He looked for solutions that challenged the very best 
     in each of us.
       It seems fitting, then, to ask all of us what we will do to 
     carry on Ernie's legacy. This is not easy. For we are in 
     troubled times. Too often the debate about education is 
     distorted and driven to the limits of ideological certitude. 
     What seems missing is Ernie's capacity to listen and learn, 
     his spirit of generosity, and his enduring efforts to build 
     consensus around achievable goals rooted in the basic 
     principles of good education.
       In many ways, the future of public education is at stake. 
     For there are some who would have us believe that public 
     education, as an institution, has outlived its usefulness. 
     They do not believe in its value, see no point in reforming 
     it, and quite literally seek to abolish it as an institution.
       I am deeply troubled by this growing intellectual retreat 
     from the democratic spirit that has always defined American 
     public education at its best. And, I am sure that Ernie would 
     have none of it. For Ernie's life work was about building up 
     public education, not tearing it down. He was a leader by 
     example, positively engaging Americans to come together for 
     the good of the children. Today, we could use a lot more 
     Ernie Boyer's to help us move into our knowledge-based future 
     with confidence.
       So I ask you to celebrate the good work of our friend Ernie 
     Boyer. We all have wonderful stories to share. Stories that 
     celebrate the joy of education and the generosity of Ernie's 
     spirit.
       But when you go home, I urge each and everyone of you to 
     roll up your sleeves--to fight as Ernie would fight for 
     better public education--to stay focused on the essentials of 
     effective teaching and learning--to be high-minded, positive, 
     and even enthusiastic--but to get on with the job of making 
     Ernie's positive vision of education a reality for future 
     generations of children.
       Thank you.
                                                                    ____


                          Stating the Obvious

                         (By Ernest Boyer, Jr.)

       It must be among the most elusive of all accomplishments--
     public acclaim joined with private fulfillment, the respect 
     and esteem of colleagues and associates balanced 

[[Page S897]]
     with the equally rich love and admiration of family and friends. This 
     is what my father achieved. Measured in terms of years, his 
     life seems all too short. But measured according to what he 
     managed to accomplish in those years not even ten lifetimes 
     seems sufficient to account for it at all. More significant, 
     though, to those of us who knew him as husband, father, 
     father-in-law, grandfather, brother, or uncle was his 
     extraordinary capacity for love. My mother likes to say that 
     he had been given an extra gift of love. It seemed so true. 
     This was not a love that called attention to itself or in 
     anyway placed expectations on those it sheltered. And it 
     certainly never sought to control or to direct, or to tell 
     others what was best. It was, rather, a love that could be so 
     unobtrusive, so quiet--and yet so intense--that it became 
     simply impossible to separate that love from the man who give 
     it. His was, then, a rare double talent--extraordinary public 
     accomplishments coupled with the even more extraordinary 
     personal qualities of a gentle but very warm humanity, an 
     unhesitating kindness, and an unqualified love.
       It is, however, not on his accomplishments nor even on his 
     love which I wish to focus--not on his accomplishments 
     because there are so many others far more qualified than I to 
     speak of those, and not on his love because in the end there 
     is so little that can be said of it. It was in many ways so 
     much a part of his presence that for anyone who ever met him 
     no further explanation is necessary, and for those who never 
     had a chance to meet him, no explanation is really possible.
       Instead, I would like to examine the one among his 
     qualities which, it seems to me, most fully links those 
     accomplishments together with that love. This was his wisdom. 
     Among the many things my father's life was for me, it became 
     eventually also a study of wisdom. Wisdom is not merely an 
     uncommon virtue. It is also a rather peculiar one. Contrary 
     to popular opinion wisdom has very little to do with 
     intelligence, for example. And although my father had a 
     brilliant mind, it was not from his intellect that his wisdom 
     came. Intelligence revels in complexity and in subtlety, both 
     of which can occasionally be helpful, but which just as often 
     can obscure and even confuse solutions. Complexity for its 
     own sake held no interest for my father. He preferred 
     simplicity, clarity.
       No, this wisdom came from another place entirely, and as I 
     watched over the years I have come to more fully appreciate 
     the nature of wisdom itself. Wisdom, I have decided, is 
     nothing more and nothing less than the ability to state the 
     obvious.
       Describing it this way may at first seem to cheapen it, to 
     dismiss it, or possibly to degrade it into something rather 
     ordinary. It does none of these. The fact is, the ability to 
     state the obvious is remarkably rare. It is rare in part, 
     because to do so requires its own manager of courage. It is 
     rare, too, because, strangely enough, the obvious is not 
     obvious to very many.
       The courage that is required is the sort needed in the face 
     of the widespread belief that stating the obvious makes a 
     person appear uninformed, or naive, or even foolish. My 
     father was none of these, and so to state the obvious with 
     the consistency with which he did so demanded not only a 
     profound self-confidence but an even more profound conviction 
     that how he himself appeared was in the long run incidental 
     to the main task to be done, which was to make the world a 
     better place. One of the things he was fond of saying was, 
     ``First decide what is the right thing to do. Then figure 
     out how you are going to do it.'' He was convinced that 
     this process should never be reversed. You should never 
     let what you think you can do try to convince you what you 
     ought to do. Start with what is right and work from there. 
     And for my father, to say that you should start with what 
     is right was to state the obvious.
       There were many other things similar.
       It was also obvious to him, for example, that there is far, 
     far more that unifies all of us as human beings than that 
     separates us. There are differences, of course, but there are 
     no differences so significant that they cancel out the far 
     more basic needs and infinitely more important hopes that all 
     people share simply by the fact of being human. Nearly every 
     problem we have, he was convinced, is the result of 
     forgetting how much each of us has in common with everyone 
     else on this planet just as nearly every solution must start 
     with the reaffirmation of that fact. Thus it was that his 
     strongest impulse, an impulse that formed a cord that tied 
     together his entire career, was always to make connections. 
     He took it as his daily task to form bridges, bridges between 
     ideas, bridges between institutions, and most important of 
     all, bridges between people. He was persuaded that there 
     could be no greater responsibility for schools, for parents, 
     or for anyone else concerned with the future of the human 
     race than to teach children how much we all have in common 
     and how much depends on the recognition that we are all in 
     this together. For him, to say this was to state the obvious.
       And simply because we all share so much, and because we are 
     all in this together, it was also obvious to him that no 
     voice should ever be ignored, and it was those least heard 
     that he was most inclined to notice. This was especially true 
     of children. All his life my father was preoccupied with 
     children. He was fully persuaded that children, simply as 
     children, had so much to offer the world. It was for him a 
     point of unwavering conviction that their voices, at least as 
     much as any one else's, had to be included as part of the 
     human solution. To him, it just seemed so obvious that this 
     should be so.
       Finally, it was for him obvious too that everything we do 
     must contribute to a greater purpose. This meant in part 
     working on a day-to-day basis to make the world a better, 
     more just place, but it also meant for him quite a bit more 
     than that. Central to who my father was was his faith that no 
     matter what any of us do in the course of our lives, it can 
     only ever be but a tiny part of who we are and what we are to 
     become. Some weeks before he died my father said to me, 
     ``I've always known how important what we do here can be, but 
     recently I've come to see so plainly all the ways in which 
     what we do here can also become what I can only describe as 
     holy.'' He told me this as something that he regarded with 
     renewed appreciation but not with surprise. On one level 
     this, too, had always been obvious to him.
       The thing is, though, that not all of this that was so 
     obvious to my father is equally obvious to everyone else.
       In a 1978 interview my father said:
       ``It takes constant awareness to see yourself in relation 
     to others, to see this moment in relation to a day or week or 
     a century, to see this planet in the universe, and to keep 
     rediscovering how important each moment is and, in a sense, 
     how fleeting and almost inconsequential in the broad sweep of 
     human history and divine plan.''
       My only quarrel would be with the word ``inconsequential.'' 
     A life such as my father's shows just how consequential one 
     person's time on earth can be. We all lose when a voice such 
     as his is silenced. Wisdom such as he offered has grown all 
     too rare. It has even sometimes seemed to me that when my 
     father died wisdom itself died with him, since the only thing 
     obvious to me now is how much I miss him. And yet he himself 
     would have been the first to protest such a thought. He would 
     have pointed out that really nothing has changed: It is still 
     true that people have more uniting them then dividing them, 
     that no voice, least of all that of any child, can ever be 
     ignored, and, most especially, that all that we do is towards 
     a larger purpose.
       These remain as obvious as they ever were, and obvious 
     especially to us now even if they are still not obvious to 
     all, because we had him to point them out to us.

                          ____________________