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Guidelines From The American International Education Foundation Show its Goal of Assimilation.

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The American International Education Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 1992 that brings foreign students to America.

Once the students are in the United States, they are assisted by advisors who help them find and apply to a school, get visas, and find living quarters.

According to the foundation’s website, the foundation tries to ”teach students how to prepare for the U. S. educational system – and how to succeed academically and socially once they arrive.”

In American education, two particular positions have dominated the debate on teaching foreign students: the pluralist model and the melting pot model.

In the pluralist model, foreign students are encouraged to retain their cultural identities that they bring from their home country and express it, so that their peers and teachers may benefit from their cultural perspectives.

In the melting pot model, students are told to forget what they were before they arrived in the United States, as they are simply thrown into a pot of nondescript ingredients.

It is paradoxical that the American educational system aims to shape students’ philosophies to be homogeneous while this agenda is masked by a supposed valuing of individuality.

The goals stated by the American International Education Foundation align with the melting pot model, just as the mainstream educational system does.

It is no wonder that so many national governmental agencies, including the U. S. Department of Commerce and the U. S. State Department, support the foundation’s projects.

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Assimilation and Indoctrination

Part of the agenda of organizations like the American International Education Foundation is to steer the thinking of foreign students so that they will like their host country.

If this aim is successful by the time these students go back to their home countries, they take with them a pro-American spirit.

Particularly of interest in the spread of American ideals are ideologies about business, freedom, and a kind of limitlessness to growth and progress that America inherited from German Romanticism in the 1800s.

This philosophy has pros and cons. There is always work that one can do to grow and become more successful or powerful.

On the other hand, this philosophy does not allow for people ever be satisfied with what they have.

The overwhelming abundance of choices and information is used to over-stimulate these foreign students into relying on their advisors and the slanted information that is provided in the program’s materials.

This dependency is what allows for the assimilation and indoctrination of these foreign students. Indoctrination might be termed as exposure.

Exposure to American values might not be so poorly received if the flip side of the process didn’t involve stamping out the cultural identities that foreign students carry with them.

The unsympathetic attitude and disinterest in other cultures’ qualities stifles students’ independence of thought.

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Why Asia?

The website of the American International Education Foundation shows that its activities so far focus largely on Chinese and Korean groups, with separate reports on students from Shanghai and Taiwan.

This focus on Asian populations reflects far east Asia’s growth as an economic power.Language is a particularly important facet of these ‘cross-cultural’ educational programs.

The promise of financial success motivates students to learn English, while the opportunity to seize another talented student’s mind motivates the federally supported programs.

Once students are indoctrinated into the American way of thinking, it is the hope of these programs that the students will either stay in the United States and be a part of the melting pot, or return to their home countries to spread American idealism there.

Educational programs are the tools that the government uses to plant ideological seeds.

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