International
Baccalaureate Director George Walker says there are three parts to the IB
curriculum, the compulsory part, the extra curriculum or co-curriculum part; and
then in his own words, the "hidden curriculum, the informal but
influential rules, beliefs and attitudes that determine the transmission of
norms and values. And these are not the norms and values of the typical US
citizens.

The quotes below
from the General Director George Walker of International Baccalaureate
Organization explain what an International Baccalaureate student is taught and
the philosophy behind the teaching. George Walker spoke these words in August
2005 shortly before he turned the office over to a new director.
These types of speeches are not posted on the normal
IBO website; they are too revealing. It does have an IBO link however so it is
official.

What global education is and what it is not

Walker explains
what global education is and what it is not. First, global
education is not what the average US citizen would think it is. It is not
international awareness of other nationalities and their views, culture, and
values; and it is not an academic education that prepares the student for
international employment.

Instead Walker
explains that a global student education is one that changes the belief system
of the student so that the student no longer believes in patriotism and
nationalism or the religion passed down by his culture. And it produces a
citizen, in Walker's own words again, with the "skill
of persuading [other] people to compromise or change their minds" as well, a
citizen with "both the ability
and the attitude that wants to shift another person’s position as well as their
own." (And they accuse the Christians and the conservatives of wanting to
impose our religion and conservative views on society.)

Who defines truth?

Walker says truth is examined and
"refocused" in all areas, including "religion and ethics." In other
word, IB's truth transcends any truth we have had passed down to us through our
religion. Truth comes through the student's own inquiry and
experiences. Therefore, there is no truth or absolutes (of course, none but
theirs). Or as Walker says, "How do we reconcile a spirit of inquiry
with a patriarchal culture that values received wisdom and rote learning? How
can a secular curriculum be adopted in a country where religious faith, rather
than empirical observation, defines the limits of truth? Is it possible to be a
free-thinking individual, perhaps perceived as amoral, in a culture where the
rules and rituals are unconditionally accepted and rigorously adhered to?" [Note
the reason for doing away with rote learning – it is received wisdom]

We see now the reason for doing away with
textbooks (received wisdom), student centered learning, and using the teacher
as a facilitator rather than an authority. This approach promotes inquiry and
trains the student to be his own expert and authority rather than his culture
and religion. IB has to break down the students' religious viewpoints and
patriotism to make them open up to believe that one religion is equal to another
(that is every religion but the Christian religion and it is always under attack
because it must be broken to produce the citizens they want.) Nationalism must
be broken down because most nations reinforce a predominant religion. The end
result, one world order and one world religion, Humanism.

In order to
understand the philosophy of IB, it is vital to understand what the IBO means
when it states: the IB Programme is rooted in a “western humanist tradition.

The U.S. Supreme
Court recognized Humanism as a religion in 1961(Torasco v Watkins, 367,
US488, June 19, 1961) As such, the American Humanist Association has its own

religious tax
exemption and its own clergy (Humanist Celebrant).

The basic
precepts of the Humanism include:

Theological atheism

Philosophical naturalism

Biological spontaneous generation
and evolution

Moral relativism

Political globalism

Ethics
paragraph from the Humanist Manifesto II reads: "We affirm that
moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous
and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems
from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole basis of life. …We
strive for the good life, here and now."

Do you want truth defined by United Nations Humanists who are atheists?

Walker lists six
characteristics of the IB educatgional program. One of them has already been
quoted above, Negotiation: the skill of persuading people to compromise or
change their minds. Another one he lists is "Criteria for truth: how do
we judge what is right or wrong? Do you want your children and our students
being taught how to determine truth and right and wrong by United
Nations humanists who are atheists?

Below (or at this link) are many quotes from George
Walker, Director General of the International Baccalaureate Organization and
the IB Educational Program from 1999 to 2005.

Debbie Pelley

dpelley@suddenlink.net

Following excerpts come from the article below:

Description of International Baccalaureate (IB)
Education by Director Himself

IB Is The Anti-Christian United Nations
Education Program Being Implemented in Arkansas

It is a great pleasure to be back in
Scandinavia and a particular pleasure to be in Sweden. I have very special
memories of previous meetings in Iceland and Denmark so thank you for inviting
me once again to join you at your conference.

Not surprisingly, you find me in retrospective
mood. At the end of this month I shall have been director general of the IBO
for six years (which means it is now impossible to blame anyone else!) but
quite soon after that – 1 January to be exact – I shall be handing over to my
successor, Jeff Beard.

It is a good moment, therefore, to look back
but instead of asking the obvious question, “What have I achieved?” I am going
to ask the more intriguing question, “What have I learned?” and in particular,
“What have I learned about international education?”

I am going to start back in 1991, long before I
joined the IBO. I had been appointed director general of the International
School of Geneva which (it would claim from time to time) had practically
invented international education.

Anyway, my first opportunity to write on the
subject (and remember that

for the previous 25 years I had worked in the
national state system of education in Britain) came in 1995 and here are the
six characteristics of international education that I thought important:

Communication:
knowing how to access information

Negotiation:
the skill of persuading people to compromise or change their minds

Cultural
understanding: recognizing that different groups have different mindsets

Global
issues: studying issues that impact across nations

Criteria
for truth: how do we judge what is right or wrong?

I shall be coming back to these six points, so
do try to keep them in mind.

But first, I want to mention what I
deliberately left out which included teaching groups of different
nationalities, studying the history, geography and customs of other countries,
arranging exchanges with foreign schools and having a strong modern languages
department, though I did add that each of those might help.

Let me explain why I chose to exclude ‘teaching
groups of different nationalities’ which

many would regard as a key feature of
international education.
[Walker goes on to explain that this part is just the first step and not the
significant one.. See later excerpts.]

International awareness in education has become
an important area of concern for politicians. Former US Secretary of Education,
Richard Riley, expressed this in 2000 when he said, "I strongly believe that the
growth of democracy, economic prosperity and economic stability throughout the
world is linked to the advance of education. This is one of the strongest
reasons why the United States should have an active and strong international
education agenda. [Riley was Clinton's Secretary of
Education]

and there will be very few developed countries
that are not measuring their education systems against those in other countries,
for example via PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) which
surveys every three years the knowledge and skills of 15-year old students in
the principal industrialized countries. Indeed, to become part of PISA is a
political aspiration for many developing countries.

in the United States where,
in Friedman’s view, the quality of education is too poor to allow people
to compete on what is slowly becoming a more level playing field.

So, I have learned that to be on the first rung
of the ladder of international education is not enough.
The best educated workforce is no longer just internationally aware. It has an
understanding of the major influences that have consigned the concepts of
the independent nation state, national company and national economy to the
history books. I have learned that students need to be globally aware.

Step 3: The global citizen

There are three remaining items on that
original list and those of you who are really paying attention will notice that
I have changed their order! They have become

Understanding criteria for truth

Cultural understanding

Skills of negotiation

and these are going to take me up to the third
level of my ladder where I learn what it means to be a ‘global citizen’.

For example, you will have noticed the emphasis
on active learning in the WIS statement:

‘seeks out’, ‘examines’, ‘evaluates’, ‘mental
flexibility’, ‘proactive’ and so on. At the heart of global citizenship is a
lively mind but a mind that will be operating within boundaries defined by truth
and falsehood. The sky is not the limit when it comes to exercising the
intellect: our concept of truth will define the limits and that will need
refocusing depending on the particular area of knowledge – scientific,
mathematical, artistic, literary, ethical,religious and so on.
That is why I have learned to appreciate the value of the Theory of Knowledge
course in the education of the global citizen.

How would the IB get on, I wonder,
if my successor were not American, but Chinese, educated exclusively in China? I
seriously doubt whether the organization could sustain either culture shock
because, in the end, much of what we do is not truly international, it has been
developed from a very influential Western humanist tradition of learning.

So another thing I have learned about
international education is that it is very rarely truly

international. For example, what view do we
have of collaborative working which is an

important feature of many non-Western cultures?
We seem to encourage it in the classroom and then punish it in the examination
hall. How do we reconcile a spirit of inquiry with a patriarchal culture that
values received wisdom and rote learning? [Not the
reason for doing away with rote learning] How can a secular curriculum be
adopted in country where religious faith, rather than empirical observation,
defines the limits of truth? Is it possible to be a free-thinking individual,
perhaps perceived as amoral, in a culture where the rules and rituals are
unconditionally accepted and rigorously adhered to?

We have arrived at the third rung on the
ladder: we have moved from the student who is

internationally aware, to one who is globally
aware to one who is a true global citizen, the person who has the necessary
intellectual skills, the cultural understanding and both the ability and the
attitude that wants to shift another person’s position as well as their own.
For me, citizenship implies action.

[Now the 2nd characteristic of IB
used above now makes sense. That characteristic noted above by Walker is

Negotiation: the skill of persuading people
to compromise or change their minds]

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned
about international education is that it does not happen by chance, by some kind
of mysterious osmosis. It is not caught; it is taught. In order to make this
point I want, quite deliberately, to take you away from the IB with which you are
so familiar and present you with Mme Maurette’s views which will be quite new.
..she urges her teachers to play down the whole concept of nationality, either
as a source of pride or of pity. Let’s avoid all sentimentality, she says.

She then argues the case for a new kind of
geography which puts the students into contact with the whole world before they
ever see a map of their own country. Individual maps are hopelessly misleading
in their scale, she says, so the Swiss have no idea that the delta of the River
Ganges is as large as Switzerland! The geography teacher (who conveniently
happened to be her father) called the subject ‘international culture’ and spent
much time getting each student to build up maps of the world. She had equally
radical ideas about history which, she insisted, should not be taught before
the age of 12 if it was to avoid becoming a gallery of dubious national heroes.
For the next six years it should become world history with events in India,
China, Japan and the Middle East synchronized with those in

Europe.

I have skimmed over the surface of this unique
publication because for my purpose today the details are unimportant. The
important point I do want to make is that the curriculum of a school can be
divided roughly into three elements. There is the

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

hidden curriculum, the informal but
influential rules, beliefs and attitudes that

determine the transmission of norms and values.

Mme Maurette attacks on all three curriculum
fronts: compulsory, extra and hidden realizing that each part must reinforce the
others; there must be a consistency of message. But I particularly admire her
courage in attacking the compulsory curriculum. “It’s not going to be any old
history course; it’s going to be this special kind of history” and that, of
course, is her legacy to the IBO and it is no coincidence that the IB Diploma Programme
grew out of a syllabus and an examination called Contemporary World History.

But the IB can only do so
much and within each element of the curriculum, and particularly in creating
the hidden curriculum that determines the school’s values, it will be the
teachers and the administrators who have an overwhelming influence.
[This is why staff development is so important – to
train the teachers to be global citizens so they can pass it on.] The
research of my colleagues a the University of Bath, Dr Mary Hayden and Professor
Jeff Thompson, has confirmed that in the eyes of students, teachers and alumni
who have experienced an international education, the international-mindedness
of their teachers and a management regime value-consistent with an institutional
international philosophy were two essential ingredients.

It is time to sum up. I have tried to trace a
path within international education from being

internationally aware, to being globally aware
to being a truly global citizen.I do not believe that international
education is simplistically synonymous with ‘a high quality education’, nor do I
believe that it happens by chance. [In other words,
good education is not the real goal; changing values and religious beliefs is
real goal.]

George Walker

Director general

Geneva

August 2005

Other relevant
information to the above:

The Diploma
Programme and Middle Years Programme grew from a western humanist tradition,
the increasing influence of non western cultures on all three programmes is not
only being acknowledged, but is becoming increasingly significant. ("Continuum
of International Education, The Primary Years Programme, PYP, from the IBO
website at this link:
http://www.ibo.org/programmes/documents/continuum.pdf

In order to
understand the philosophy of IB, it is vital to understand what the IBO means
when it states: the IB Programme is rooted in a “western humanist tradition.

The U.S. Supreme
Court recognized Humanism as a religion in 1961(Torasco v Watkins, 367,
US488, June 19, 1961) As such, the American Humanist Association has its own

religious tax
exemption and its own clergy (Humanist Celebrant).

The basic
precepts of the Humanism include:

Theological atheism

Philosophical naturalism

Biological spontaneous generation
and evolution

Moral relativism

Political globalism

Humanist Manifesto II reads,

Ethics

THIRD:
We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics
is autonomous and situational needing no theological or ideological sanction.
Ethics stems from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole
basis of life. …We strive for the good life, here and now.

Many kinds of humanism exist in the
contemporary world. The varieties and emphases of naturalistic humanism include
"scientific," "ethical," "democratic," "religious," and "Marxist" humanism.
Free thought, atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, deism, rationalism, ethical
culture, and liberal religion all claim to be heir to the humanist tradition.
Humanism traces its roots from ancient China, classical Greece and Rome, through
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to the scientific revolution of the
modern world. But views that merely reject theism are not equivalent to
humanism. They lack commitment to the positive belief in the possibilities
of human progress and to the values central to it. Many within religious groups,
believing in the future of humanism, now claim humanist credentials. Humanism is
an ethical process through which we all can move, above and beyond the divisive
particulars, heroic personalities, dogmatic creeds, and ritual customs of past
religions or their mere negation.
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto2.html Humanist Manifesto
II, Preface

World Community

TWELFTH:
We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have
reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend
the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world
community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus we
look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon
transnational federal government. This would appreciate cultural pluralism and
diversity.
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto2.html Twelfth

THIRTEENTH:
This world community must renounce the resort to violence and force as a
method of solving international disputes. We believe in the peaceful
adjudication of differences by international courts and by the development of
the arts of negotiation and compromise. War is obsolete. So is the use of
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. It is a planetary imperative to
reduce the level of military expenditures and turn these savings to peaceful and
people-oriented uses.
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto2.html Thirteenth

As the IB’s
philosophical foundation, Humanist beliefs permeate the curriculum. For
example:Ian Hill, IBO Deputy Director General, states his case for moral
relativism: “Values are learned, not inherited.. Education therefore performs a
fundamental role as one of the factors which shapes values. They do not exist
in a vacuum, and they are not immutable; circumstances can cause one's beliefs
to change. .
http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art53.pdf " Curriculum
Development and Ethics in International Education" by Ian Hill, Deputy Director
General of IBO.