Is the IB Programme Marxist? Is IB socialist? Does IB push the concept of World Government? Does IB seek to indoctrinate our children with liberal philosophies?
These are legitimate questions and they have been asked time and time again. We have provided copies of original documents that will allow you to determine for yourself what is the ideology of the IB Organization and does IB insert this philosophy into their curriculum. Remember IB markets its K-12 curriculum throughout the world. The Primary Years Programme begins with children as young as 3 years. Look carefully first at the IB philosophy, then at some sample lessons we have acquired. Use the pop-up tabs in the navigation column to link to the evidence. You decide if there is anything to worry about.
IB's Communist Beginnings
To embrace IB without knowing about the ideology it is based upon, is like going to church without reading the Bible. Orwell had a name for it - group think. IBO may claim it promotes "open-mindedness" and "critical thinking", but when students lack basic information and skills, their minds will be biased by that which is presented to them by their teachers and they will be unable to think critically about much of anything.
Sadly, few of those who were adults at the time UNESCO was formed are still with us. We are blessed to have discovered the writings of Ellen McClay and her book In The Presence of Our Enemies, also known as the very much alive, Gene Birkeland. McClay goes into great detail in her book regarding the Communist beliefs held by Alger Hiss and Archibald MacLeish, co-founders of UNESCO in 1945. TAIB believes there's no such thing as coincidence and that Gene and TAIB have become acquainted in order to join forces in the 21st Century to fight the evils of UNESCO which has adopted IB as its international vehicle into the minds of children.
According to this website, "In October 1952, Joseph McCarthyclaimed that MacLeish had belonged to more Communist front organizations than any man he had investigated."
It was with great amusement that TAIB came across this gem from IBO's former Director General George Walker. In order to understand what IB really is, one must know the REAL history of how it came to be. Emphasis in the following passage, is TAIB's:
In 1945 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established with its headquarters in Paris and the ringing words of poet Archibald MacLeish—“Since wars begin in the minds of men it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”—introducing its charter. Contact was soon made with the international schools movement and indeed UNESCO’s first education seminar in 1947 was on the theme of education for international understanding. A small group of head teachers volunteered to form the Conference of Internationally Minded Schools (1951) and in the same year the International Schools Association (ISA) was founded by parents and governors of international schools associated with the United Nations. Arguably the boldest contribution towards a distinctive programme of international education came in 1948 when UNESCO published a radical, visionary pamphlet by Marie-Thérèse Maurette, the director of the International School of Geneva.* International-mindedness, Maurette insisted, was taught rather than caught. Rubbing shoulders daily with students of different nationalities was, of course, of huge benefit, but it was not enough. What mattered was the school’s formal learning and its teachers’ values. She introduced new atlases that gave more prominence to the world than to individual countries; she designed a completely new world history course; she insisted that students should learn a second language and participate in community service. She became obsessive about identifying sources of unbiased political and economic information, trying to persuade UNESCO to help her. She worried that the teachers were far less internationally minded than their students, and designed courses of training for them. In short, she laid the foundations for a scalable programme of international education. During the 1950s the different jigsaw pieces of such a programme began to fit together around a growing problem that demanded an urgent solution: international schools could no longer afford the resources needed to prepare small numbers of students for entry to universities in different countries around the world. With generous external funding, the hard work of many teachers and administrators and a substantial measure of compromise, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (DP) was developed during the following decade. The phrase “international baccalaureate” was first used in 1962; students sat the first trial examinations in 1963; the first IB diplomas were awarded in 1970 to students in 11 schools.
Here, at last, was an international programme balancing breadth and depth that satisfied the universities: Introduction: Past, present and future • six subjects chosen from distinctive areas of knowledge and studied at two different levels • a research project • community service • a distinctive study of the theory of knowledge. More than 40 years later the DP retains all those early structural elements (though the content has kept pace with the times) in a rare example of educational stability and continuity
IB is based on the ideology of Communists like Maurette and MacLeish. This has not changed in over 40 years. If anything, it has become far more intrusive with IB's introduction of its PYP and MYP to our youngest, most impressionable children.
IB can deny its radical left-wing bias from now till the cows come home. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we're pretty sure it's a duck. History, viewed anew, shows us McCarthy should have been paid closer attention to, rather than vilified as he is by the Progressive movement.
Some key phrases he uses in the speech to describe the "hidden curriculum": "-compulsory, timetabled part of the learning in which everyone participates" "-extra- or co-curriculum which is voluntary but enriches the compulsory curriculum; it is what we often remember most from our school experience" "- the informal but influential rules, beliefs and attitudes that determine the transmission of norms and values."