As education policies in Britain, the United States and elsewhere focus attention and resources increasingly on “graduating” the lower half of the intellectual Bell Curve the private sector has produced a response that benefits its top quartile. The International Baccalaureate is increasingly becoming an international “Gold Standard” of education for the cognitive elite.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, different countries developed different approaches to secondary education. In the affluent United States, college became a dream for children from poor backgrounds quite early on, before 1900, so secondary education was designed to graduate the greatest possible percentage of students from high school, giving them a broad but rather undemanding intellectual grounding that would fit them for college (some colleges being intellectually demanding, others including some famous names much less so) or skilled labor in the real world.
In Britain, the class system played an important role. Academically able children were segregated into “grammar schools” (or, for the wealthier the private “public schools”) and were there offered a curriculum that would fit the ablest for Oxford or Cambridge, and give even the less able a considerable amount of intellectual training, without any great thought as to whether it would be useful in the wider world. The disadvantage of the British system was that it specialized early and became very narrow; as late as the 1960s it was almost impossible to take “A” levels (the higher school academic qualification) in both science and arts subjects.
France and Germany, logical countries both, took a logical approach to secondary education, seeing it as a method of producing the highest possible quality skilled workforce. The French Baccalaureat and the German Abitur combine the more demanding features of both British and U.S. secondary education. They are intellectually rigorous, in the way that British A levels used to be and U.S. high school courses never really were, and they insist on study in a broad range of subjects before a diploma is granted. Effectively, therefore, they are the equivalent of 6-8 British ‘A’ levels, compared with the normal 3, or an additional 2 years of U.S. high school.
These examinations are not new innovations; the first “Abiturreglement” was designed by the Prussian Diet in 1788, while the Baccalaureat similarly dates back to the Napoleonic period. The Baccalaureat is indeed not the final end-product of French educational rigor; the most able students take a 2 year “Khagne” (Classes preparatoire Literaire) after the Baccalaureat to prepare themselves for entry into the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Two trends, both originating in the 1960s, began to alter this pattern, which had been generally satisfactory for the middle classes and for intelligent children of the poor. First, political demands to provide an adequate basic education for the poorer and less capable three quarters of society increased. In all countries, this involved a “dumbing down” of the rigor in school curricula. In Britain for example the grammar schools were largely replaced with mixed-ability comprehensive schools, the extremely undemanding GCSE examination replaced the old “O” level and the previously sacrosanct “A” levels were eviscerated. These trends made it easier for the less capable to get an adequate educational qualification, at the cost of dooming the most capable to class-year upon class-year of moving achingly slowly through the syllabus, revising for examinations that were too easy for them, or were based on work they had covered a year or more earlier.
In the United States, the 1960-85 period also saw the dumbing down of the school curricula, the introduction into them of much politically correct material of vacuous intellectual content and (probably not coincidentally) an explosion in drug culture and teenage delinquency that has left U.S. jails bulging at the seams ever since. While the period after 1985 saw a return to school rigor, and much hand-wringing about international tests that put U.S. high-schoolers firmly towards the bottom of the list, President George W. Bush’s “No child left behind” Act of 2001, apart from being a huge waste of money, perpetuated the problem of education aiming itself at the lowest common denominator rather than at the elite. If middle and high schoolers have to take standardized tests every year, the brightest students will be held back to the slow pace of the majority, and much of their ability and potential will be lost to the U.S. and world economy.
The other international trend, concentrated in the private sector, was the globalization of the world economy and life in general, and the consequent surge in demand for international college educations. If a British student believes that Cambridge offers an insufficiently practical and market-oriented approach to engineering, he wants to be able to look at the possibilities at MIT and CalTech. Similarly, if an American student from a small town feels that his local college offers him an insufficiently broad background in literature, art or history, he wants to be able to spend at least some time at a French or German university, where he can acquire that spurious international polish that will be useful to him in landing high level jobs in later life. Conversely, French or German students wishing to acquire familiarity with international business, or despairing at the uneven quality of their domestic universities, will look at Britain or the United States for a more attractive alternative.
When combined with dumbed down national secondary schools, the new desire for an international college education becomes very difficult to satisfy. Not only does a college admissions dean have to assess results from a foreign education system, he also has to assess how those results rank in terms of domestic examination results, and in terms of foreign results from other countries. A student from a country with examination results that have been dumbed down and may be deteriorating further most likely doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. Only in Britain, where university funding depends heavily on attracting foreign students (because they pay much higher fees than local ones) may this tendency to an extent be counterbalanced.
To satisfy the need for a high quality, internationally accepted secondary school examination, the International Baccalaureate Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland, was created in 1968. The International Baccalaureate Diploma is constructed on similar lines to the French Baccalaureat and the German Abitur, but it operates primarily in English. This eliminates the difficulty for Anglosphere students of taking examinations in a second language (which Anglosphere education systems teach very poorly) and permits students from third countries to operate in what is normally their second language, English, rather than having to learn a third language, German or French, to a high level.
Today, the IB Diploma is offered by 1,468 schools in 199 countries to approximately 200,000 pupils. One might have expected the free market to have produced this result, but the IBO is a non-profit foundation. A non-profit structure presumably is perceived more favorably by the education community, and also may avoid the danger of the organization going “off-mission” in search of short term profit.
The schools offering the IB diploma differ interestingly from country to country. In Britain, penetration is quite high with 69 schools offering the diploma. Almost none of these are conventional state comprehensive schools, but the state does offer an IB Diploma option through “sixth form colleges” in many places. British public schools are slowly catching onto the IB, which is particularly suited to their pupils as many British colleges are beginning to discriminate artificially against children of wealthy parents; Eton is to begin offering the diploma shortly, for example. Indeed public schools such as my own alma mater, Cheltenham College, may be missing a trick by not offering the IB, since they are largely condemning their pupils to a British state university system that is biased against them as being neither foreign nor poor.
In the United States, the IB is increasing rapidly in popularity, with its main penetration being state schools in affluent suburbs around the major East and West coast cities. In these areas, funding for public education is ample, and awareness by the parents of international opportunities and international education standards is relatively high, as is their desire for an education that intellectually stretches their offspring. Curiously, although as many as 439 U.S. schools offer the IB Diploma the most famous private schools, such as Groton, Andover and Exeter do not – presumably their parent bodies are so rich that educational quality is felt to be an irrelevance!
In France, only 11 schools offer the IB, all of them private and most apparently oriented towards non-French speakers. Likewise in Germany only 17 schools offer the IB, although three of those schools are state system gymnasia.
This pattern, with Baccalaureat/Abitur school systems losing fewer students to the IB than Anglo-American school systems, suggests that educational quality rather than international diploma acceptability is currently the main driver of the IB movement. An IB student in France or Germany would gain an internationally recognized diploma, but would presumably receive an education no better than was available in the domestic system.
Kings debauching the currency and the difficulties of international exchange eventually led the world to devise a monetary system, the Gold Standard, which allowed a single reliable store of value to be used throughout the world. Likewise in education today, states that are debauching their education systems, or producing systems focused too narrowly on bringing the less intelligent up to a minimum level, have produced a market reaction, in the form of the International Baccalaureate.
The IB is potentially education’s Gold Standard, whose value is constant both between different countries, and, equally important, from one decade to the next. Like the original Gold Standard, we are likely to find that it has irresistible advantages.
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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)
This article originally appeared on United Press International.