From the Middle School and High School Principal

 The International Baccalaureate - what is it? and for that matter, why is it?

As a school a key strategic aim is to move in ever closer alignment to our mission and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme we offer in Grade 11 and 12.  Which begs the question, what is it?

The answer to that can be found in the history of the 'IB' as it is fondly called, recorded in this book by one of its founders.

The short version goes something like this.  Kurt Hahn after setting up his first school in Germany, was forced to flee Nazi prosecution after he insisted his students chose between the school values, or Nazism, and said they couldn't choose both!  A brave thing to do, which as Jew landed him in a Nazi jail.  Some powerful friends petitioned for his release, and he was exiled to the UK.  There he busily set about setting up his new school, Gordonstoun based on his ideas about outdoor education and service.  But he had not got to internationalism yet.

At a NATO conference in the 1950s, he noticed that many former enemies (Italy, Germany, the UK, Spain, France) all seemed to get along really well when they got to know each other - but he'd seen them trying to kill each other 10 years before (and indeed before that, as he had been an attendee at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War 1).  He had a simple thought - what if we had 'international schools' where people of different nations got to know each other?  Might that mean we would live in a more pluralistic and peaceful world?  So being a person of action - he started a new school, Atlantic College in Wales, the first United World College or UWC.

Within a year or two there was an obvious problem - whose history do you teach?  whose literature?  And all the students needed different national exams to get into university - and the curriculum of each was extremely narrow and nationalistic.  What to do?

Well, it helps if you have a friend who runs the educational faculty at the University of Oxford.  So Kurt Hahn asked his friend Alec Peterson to help.  Peterson is a role model and hero for me, and I've enjoyed seeking out people who knew him and asked them about him.  His answer was elegant, simple and transformative.  It was also decades ahead of its time.  

Here's his answer: Don't teach content on its own, teach human's 'main tools of thought' which are language (both language & literature and acquisition), maths, science, humanities called individuals and societies, experimental sciences, and the arts.  For each choose or allow a wide range of illustrative examples from a range of cultures - and focus on the transferable concepts that work in multiple contexts, but supported by strong examples that give breadth and flexibility.  Put creativity, action and service projects at the core.  Also these 'tools of thought' have different ways of creating knowledge - e.g. maths is mostly deduction from axioms, science is induction from empirical data, literature is abduction to interpretation... teach the students this, so they understand all these ways of thinking and how to use them together in a subject called 'Theory of Knowledge' (which also helped, as the French students at UWC were required at that time by the French government to learn philosophy, and that would cover it!).  And finally, do that in a very diverse and pluralistic community.

Thus was born the IB.  It is now regarded as the highest quality educational programme for High Schools in the world - and we are privileged to have been the first school in Scotland to offer it, and still the only school in the North of Scotland to do so.  Next week I will share more about our plans to further align our middle school to the IB.