This document considers the education of Oriental Americans a dilemma, since the Oriental-American minority is reported to represent proportionately the highest educated group in the U.S., bears a pluralistic and bicultural background, and a long history of having been subjected to restrictions and exploitation in the American West. The main emphasis and the major theme of writing in the document is on education and the community, specifically Oriental American. Three minority groups, Japanese, Filipino, and Chinese (Koreans as a group for study are included only in the summary and conclusion section) living in California are examined in terms of various areas such as historicism, acculturation, contact, competition, accomodation, assimilation, the culture and the family, housing, employment, religion, and education and the dropout. A chronology of dates which lends emphasis to sequence of events is applied in some sections. The summary and conclusion section relies heavily on Arnold G. Holden's "A Typology of Individual Migration Patterns," whose typology was employed to classify the sub-groups into its eight cells. (Author/AM)