The History of International Baccalaureate (IB)

Tracing the history of IB, or International Baccalaureate

Author

International School Dad
February 16, 2024

TL;DR - If you have only a couple of minutes, you can skim through the bullets below.

  • IB, or International Baccalaureate, started in the late 1960s in Switzerland.

  • The idea for what today is the IB came from a history teacher during a class on WWII.

  • The core philosophy of IB hinges on three key pillars:

    • International in Spirit

    • Universally Acceptable

    • Teaching Approach Rooted in Critical Thinking

  • From an initial graduating class of 13 students in 1971, IB has now become a movement that spans thousands of schools worldwide.

Now, on to the main article.

A while ago, when we were researching international school boards for our kids, a common question kept coming up - when did these boards start?

More importantly, what prompted someone to start an initiative so fundamental that led to what we today know as the IB or International Baccalaureate? Let’s take a look.

The Origin of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program

On a fine spring morning in 1960, Robert Leach was teaching history to a class that had students from 20 different nationalities. Gradually, the class discussion led to the topic of WWII, when a student casually raised her hand to suggest that it was her country that had won the Second World War.

Intrigued, Leach, who was the Head of History at the International School of Geneva, asked around the class if other students agreed.

The next few minutes revealed themselves in slow motion. Almost every student in that class believed that it was their own country that had emerged victorious in WWII. Mind you, the war had ended merely 15 years ago, and sentiments around this topic were largely driven by nationalistic jingoism.

This was a moment of reckoning.

Since the end of the war, Leach and a few of his contemporaries had nursed the idea of a new approach to teaching history - one that was free from any particular nationalistic narrative and was based on questioning every source of historical evidence, regardless of its origin.

They thought that it would give students a view of their world that was based on interdependence and cooperation across nations, races, and creeds and not restricted to one dominant, nationalistic point of view.

Putting the “International” in International Baccalaureate (IB)

It appears that history was not the only subject that educators considered influenced by national narratives.

Subjects such as the sciences and mathematics had a similar problem. Scientific and mathematical notations would vary from one culture to another. Not only that, every culture would have its own claims on the origin of fundamental theorems and scientific principles.

This had to be corrected. If an educational system that promotes global peace and international cooperation were to be built, a new process and theory of learning needed to be built from the ground up.

Geneva - A Hub for the Globally Mobile

There was another tailwind pushing the adoption of an international pedagogy. As is the case today, Geneva in the 1960s was a hub for the globally mobile.

Diplomats, UN staff, and senior executives of multi-national corporations came flocking in droves to the city. Their kids would be uprooted from one country to another every few years, and preparing them for university education became a nightmare for their parents.

The idea of an international educational system that could be adopted by schools across the world and would provide an official qualification recognised by universities globally, would solve a big problem for the city’s dwellers.

The Search for a New Pedagogy

Most of the traditional teaching methods until the 1960s had been around for centuries. They incentivised students to excel based on rote learning and actively discouraged original thinking. Learning content was standardised, which meant scant opportunities for students to specialise early and go deeper in an area of interest.

The worst part? Research suggested that the senior school curriculum barely prepared students to excel in their professional lives, leaving them to fend for themselves and figure out ways to learn beyond school.

International Baccalaureate wanted to change that and bring a new approach to teaching.

For starters, students would be encouraged to think critically and be intellectually curious, discarding memorisation as a means to build knowledge.

The idea was to make lifelong learners - individuals who would be able to adapt to any life or professional situation by using the same framework they used as kids.

Core Ideas of International Baccalaureate (IB)

Finally, the core ideas for IB distilled down to three key elements:

  • International in Spirit - acceptance of diverse perspectives

  • Universally Acceptable - allowing students to be globally mobile

  • Teaching Approach Rooted in Critical Thinking

In July 1971, the first class of 13 students at the International School of Geneva received their International Baccalaureate diplomas, sparking a revolution in school education.

At around the same time in Great Britain, Alec Peterson, who was the Head of the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University, published a series of papers voicing his discontent with the British school curriculum.

Peterson had worked with Lord Mountbatten in Asia as the Head of Psychological Warfare during the Second World War, and the opportunity to work on developing an international curriculum brought them together again as a powerful force in the promotion of IB. He became the first Director General of IB and served in that position throughout IB’s formative years from 1966 until 1977.

The first IB office was established in Geneva in 1964, initially under the name of “International Schools Examination Syndicate (ISES)” and became officially registered as the International Baccalaureate Office (IBO) in 1986. Subsequently, a regional IB office was opened in New York in 1975 that fell under the governance of the newly created IB North America Board.

The global expansion continued through the 1980s with the establishment of regional offices in Buenos Aires, London, and Singapore in 1982, followed by Washington DC (2010), The Hague (2011), Singapore (2012), and Cardiff (2016). IB is truly on its path to becoming the global standard in international school education as it continues to evolve and develop.

There are many fascinating details about the evolution of IB that I will write about. Do subscribe to make sure they get straight to your inbox.

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