What is the nature of international education within the International Baccalaureate’s mission? How do the IB’s programmes (PYP, MYP and DP) promote this in schools?
What is the nature of international education? According to the UNESCO 1996 (p.9) declaration at the international conference on education, international education is aimed to develop student to become an international citizen that has a sense of universal values for a culture of peace and able to value freedom and its civic responsibility, equipped with skills to make informed choice or resolution that is non-violent and feelings of solidarity and equity when dealing with the national and international issues. Furthermore, student should also develop intercultural understanding that encourages the convergence of ideas and solutions and respect for cultural heritage and protection of the environment to promote world peace.
But has IB program mission statements aligned with the nature of international education? The IB’s mission statement of 2003 stated as follow:
Statement 1 (Idealistic)
“The International Baccalaureate Organisation aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.”
In this statement, the goal of IB and international education is clearly the same. Both are to achieve a peaceful world through intercultural understanding.
Statement 2 (Holistic)
“To this end the IBO works with schools, governments and international organisations to develop challenging programs of international education and rigorous assessment”
As for statement 2 IBO clearly stated that they want to develop an international education with all the stakeholders.
Statement 3: (Pedagogical)
“These programs encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.” -
(www.ibo.org)
Statement 3 expound how IBO program can support world peace by encouraging their student to accept the differences of others, which aligns with the purpose of the international education that is to seek intercultural understanding.
Besides, Hacking et al (2018) also linked the global citizenship concept propagated by UNESCO international education to the international mindedness philosophy in the IB education.
In essence, the IB mission statements are aligned with the international education goals declared by the UNESCO.
However, researchers still argued that there are many contradictories practises found in the IB schools that do not conform to the international education ideology. In this assignment, we are also going to evaluate these IB mission statements and investigate their pitfalls.
Idealistic vs Pragmatic (International Mindedness)
Mission statement one has an idealistic philosophy which is to achieve world peace. The critics from the United World Colleges accused how some IB schools behaved more like an international school that dominated by the demands of university entrance rather than schools that promote international mindedness, and thus world peace.
In order to examine this criticism, first one has to understand the history of the international schools and IB schools, which are part of the international schools. Due to the international mobility problem back in the early day of 1960s, International school was found to serve the expatriates from a variety of countries. This was the embedded liberalism period of international school that trying to overcome the educational access difficulties of the expatriates’ children to their home-country universities (Peterson, 1984). This type of schools practiced unilateral internationalism (Leach, 1969) and created a “cultural bubble” (Pearce, 1994a) by isolating the expatriate’s children’s educational environment from the local culture. Nevertheless, the pioneer of the international school offered a practical solution that imported the western education system to the cosmopolitan elites.
The international school at that time also brought young people of different cultures together. Until now, the international school with multicultural environment without international mindedness continue to exist (T.Bunnell). This type of schools are there to improve students’ English levels and prepare them to study abroad so that their students could study in an established universities in North America, the United Kingdom or Australia without losing their national identity and cultures.
But in the 21st
century, the practical solution offered to the expatriate during the founding years has to be transformed. We had gone through the transitionary period and is in the neoliberal era. UNESCO would like to achieve the aims of international education, which was declared in 1996 and 1998. This transformation drives by the UNESCO has to involve the ideology of international mindedness, which also can be interpreted as international education, international understanding, global citizenship, intercultural understanding, globalist and internationalism. This ideology supports the first and third mission statements and was intertwined with globalisation that happened in the last few decades.
According to Jones (1998), globalisation is accomplished through free trade in a global marketplace platform that is subject to minimum regulation to achieve economic integration. Therefore without the free trade or economic globalisation, you may argued that, there would not be any migration or international mobility of the expatriates to facilitate the “global need” or the formation of the international schools. However, Smith (2003, P36) thinks that “globalisation is fraught with various kinds of identity crises, ranging from eroding senses of national identity to unprecedented losses of indigenous language and cultures under the homogenising pressures of global capital.” Furthermore, globalisation has partial denationalization the education system. It helped to market a singular global certification of educational qualification and ultimately create a transitional capitalist class. Therefore many government authorities feel threaten to initiative IB because they are afraid of losing their own national values in their education system. The threat of denationalization of the education system started to subside when North American public schools and middle east private schools starting to adopt the IB programmes. Most of these schools changed the content of the curriculum to suit the local context but preserved the pedagogical practices such as promoting critical thinking and intercultural understanding (Paris, 2003). In a way that can be seen as the harmonising process with the international mindedness approach.
On the other hand, international mindedness philosophy started its foundations by servicing others and upholding global citizenship. This approach was promoted by the educational philosophy of Kurt Hahn, who inspired the United World Colleges movement and emphasis on experiential learning and “character building” (Price, 1970). At heart, he was less concerned with the academic achievements of his students than with their affective attributes such as moral development, ambitions and perceptions. Then, the idealist dream of IB, the international understanding emerged for the next social change. This philosophy was about the progressive education of “the whole person” that championed the importance of one’s own culture in developing a multicultural perspective. It was adopted from Maalouf’s (2000) “multiple allegiances” approach to other cultures. This allegiances approach helped the students to become more tolerance and capable of acknowledging others that they can be right in being different (Peel 1988) but only after first knowing themselves better. In saying that, denying basic human rights and killing innocent people are not condoned for any reason. Ultimately the IBO want students to understand the reason behind such extremes so that they can help to find a way to remove those causes. However, educational policies related to the international mindedness created tensions with the functional operation of an international diploma to gain university entry. I would envisage that the social elite families who paid exorbitant fees for the global diploma certificate would strongly against this initiative. To resolve this tension, IB not only created TOK for transdisciplinary studies to understand our world (Nicolescu, 2005) and CAS for experiential learning and encouraging empathy, but also maintained the compartmentalised and traditional DP program required by the entry criteria of universities.
Eastern vs Western cultures (Challenge of the International Mindedness)
Haywood (2007) pointed out that IB also provide explicit cultural guidance to its programmes based on the ten IB learning profile attributes – inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced and reflective, which could be categorised in the four attributes themes: cognitive, conative, affective and culture. It is a holistic way to develop international minded students, our future leaders so that they can create a better and peaceful world. For example, high Intelligent Quotient (cognitive ability) students with low Emotional Quotient (affective ability) would not be able to comprehend the suffering of the peers since they don’t have empathy for others. These people will create more conflicts to the world because they are usually very critical of others’ differences. Only when one shows affective, one can be open-minded and learned from other culture, contribute to the greater good and be a good communicators in dealing with the diverse world. In other word, they are not balanced to achieve well-being for the society and themselves.
In saying that, many of these attributes are derived from the western culture. In order to promote global engagement within the multicultural environment especially with the eastern world, we have to learn from each other and should not have a dominant recessive relationship between western and eastern of the world. For example, some of the attributes actually go against the eastern values such as authority and critical thinking instead of respect; conservative instead of taking risk. Walker (2010), proposed to focus on the shared humanity elements such as good communications, collegiality, high expectations, and openness to change. Whereas, IB philosophy require all students first to relate their own national identity before exposing themselves to alien view. The end result is hoping by encouraging them to response in an open-minded and compassionate way, they can see others also can be right in being different (Peel 1988).