International Education and the Hope For A Better World

39 If international education is to advance these aims -- of perception and perspective, of empathy and the humanizing of international relations -- it cannot be treated as a conventional instrument of a nation's foreign policy. Most emphatically, it cannot be treated as a propaganda program designed to "improve the image" of a country or to cast its current policies in a favorable light. Nor can its primary purpose be regarded as simply the cultivation of "good will," which may come as a by-product of serious educational activities but cannot be regarded as their direct objective. Nor can educational exchange properly be treated as an instrument of foreign policy in anything like the sense that diplomacy is such an instrument; it is indeed a corruption of the educational process -- and one that is likely to fail besides -- to try to use educational exchange as a means of advancing current political, economic or military projects. Education can be regarded as an instrument of foreign policy only in the sense that the cultivation of international perceptio