The International Baccalaureate Organization and Its Diploma Program: Anecdotal Evaluation

There is no end to the evaluation of educational systems. Books and articles flow ceaselessly, analyzing and appraising educational schemes.

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) has been marketing its Diploma Program (DP) since 1968. In that year, the DP was launched as an experiment, and was launched as a mature plan several years later. The IBO prefers the spelling ‘Programme’ for the DP.

In the following half-century, reams of prose have been published about the DP, some writers praising it, and others damning it. No attempt is here made to summarize, or give an overview of, the mountains of text which describe the DP.

Instead, five brief observations:

• One strength of the DP is its emphasis on Foreign Language instruction. Especially in the United States, any trend which energizes World Language instruction is welcomed.
• Another strength of the DP is its unabashed and explicit focus on high-stakes standardized examinations as exit tests. This prepares students for professional board and certification tests, and for the tests which they will face both in the university and in their efforts to gain admission to graduate schools.
• One weakness of the DP is occasional confusion of form and content. In some ‘Language Acquisition’ assessments, it is possible for a student with lower language skills to earn a better grade by mouthing IB doctrines about various topics — the importance of environmentalism, etc. — while a student with stronger language skills might earn of lower grade by choosing to talk about modern architecture or 19th-century poetry.
• Another weakness in the DP lies in its directing students away from practices which would foster academic competency. Regarding the ‘written assignment’ for language acquisition, for example, the IB instructions state: “A formal (literary) essay is not an acceptable text type for the written assignment.” Students are then allowed to choose how they will structure their writing, but the one option which they may not choose is the one which they will need for their university careers. (This assignment was replaced for the examinations starting in springtime 2020.)
• One more flaw in the DP is the manner in which teachers are prepared to instruct in the program. A careful analysis of the DP reveals that effective teaching will focus on giving students the skills necessary to achieve on the assessments which will earn the Diploma. Yet many of the seminars which claim to prepare teachers for the DP direct teacher attention away from test preparation and toward a multitude of other topics and activities.

Happily, many teachers have developed ad hoc approaches to accomodate for the weaknesses of the DP while retaining its strengths.

No educational program is perfect. In choosing an education, students and parents must simply decide which set of problems they can accept. The DP has both advantages and disadvantages. Wise students and parents will find their own ways of compensating for the DP’s weaknesses while enjoying its benefits.

Educating for the Future: Really?

According to a famous proverb, a good education teaches the student ‘how to think, not what to think.’ Most educators, and most other people, will agree. Yet the concrete application of this proverb remains elusive.

Criticizing schools which either teach a narrow and specific set of skills, e.g., how to write in C++ for various operating systems, or teach lots in information, scholar Noah Yuval Harari describes a common sentiment that schools should teach the broadest and most flexible skills:

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Yet precisely those schools which claim to implement the idea ‘four C’ education are in fact violators of those very principles.

Schools which present themselves as teaching ‘critical thinking’ often use various slogans - ‘inquirers, risk-takers, thinkers, open-minded, balanced, reflective’ - but in reality have a set of axiomatic beliefs which together constitute a worldview: a worldview which they seek to inculcate into the students.

This becomes clear when examining political, religious, and social questions. If one examines how a school indirectly and subtly nudges its students toward various viewpoints, it becomes clear that the school is not teaching a neutral skills of ‘how to think critically,’ but is rather seeking to indoctrinate.

Likewise, schools may claim to teach the skill of communication, but often shy away from the rigor needed to give students the ability to write clearly and concisely. Whether writing persuasively or informatively, a student needs a facility for spelling, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, idioms, devices, and styles.

Many schools, however, avoid the discipline of teaching clear communication, claiming that instruction in composition is ‘oppressive’ and an exercise in imperialism.

Is it possible to have schools which are truly neutral purveyors of thinking and communication skills? Or would it be better for schools to simply and openly state their cultural and social prejudices so that parents and students become informed consumers?

Doing the Wrong Things for the Wrong Reasons: American Universities Lose Their Sense of Mission

The urge toward universal education is a clear pattern in American history. At first, it meant striving to keep all students in school until eighth grade. It grew to include high school, and the desire to see all students complete twelfth grade.

This trend emerged before public education was a widely-embraced concept. When most schools were local and parochial, the society and its institutions felt responsible to provide assistance to whichever students might not readily be able to afford education.

The distinction between ‘public school’ and ‘private school,’ as we’ve conceptualized it in the early twenty-first century, was not an articulated categorization earlier in our nation’s history. From today’s perspective, many of those early schools were neither strictly public nor strictly private; they were hybrids of the two.

In any case, the urge to expand universal education eventually grew to include post-secondary. The debatable and debated desire appeared, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to see every student attend college.

As noble as the intentions behind this desire may have been, it led to the dilution of the university’s purpose, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.

As increasing percentages of each year’s high school graduates matriculated, the impact on the university became noticeable. The desire to have ‘everyone’ attend college has changed college.

When comparing the university of the past with the university of the present, there are two errors which threaten: either to see the past as superior in all ways to the present, or to see the present as in all ways superior to the past. We can achieve a sober analysis by steering between the two.

The features of the university which have largely disappeared are catalogued by scholar Robert Bork:

The difference between education today or education in the last sixty or seventy years and what it was before that is to be measured in light years. The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics.

It’s worth noting that chemistry and mathematics were included in the education of a student who would make her career in literature. This reflects the university’s goal of imparting both thinking skills and the mastery of bodies of knowledge.

It was not unusual for a student working toward a doctorate in British Literature to be required to do a semester of calculus, or a student studying theology to complete courses in physics. Such was the university’s understanding of itself and its mission.

An Alternative to High School Athletics: High School Physical Fitness

In the early twenty-first century American high school, athletic programs continue to attract large numbers of students. But what about students who don’t participate in team or individual sports?

In many high schools, the student body is divided into those who are part of a sports program, and those who aren’t.

Students who aren’t part of a school’s athletic system are still in need of exercise. But there are very few avenues for physical fitness apart from sports teams.

Many high schools have reduced the number of required semesters of physical education or gym class.

If organizations outside the school could coordinate with schools, there might be an opportunity to encourage bicycling, hiking, canoeing, etc., for high school students.

This need is all the more pressing inasmuch as a significant demographic segment of teenagers spends much, or even most, of its time interacting with some electronic device. Sedentary lifestyles are leading to obesity and diabetes among an increasing number of teenagers.

Athletic programs seem to persist through good times and bad, because there is a consistent desire for them. Physical fitness programs may require more intentional encouragement from adults.

Resources directed away from high school athletic departments would not endanger sports programs, because such programs always find a way to continue.

Such resources could be directed toward physical fitness initiatives, which often tend to be less expensive, because they do not require stadiums, arenas, or much specialized equipment or coaching staff.

Communities might be well-advised to spend less effort on high school sports and high school athletics, and more effort on high school physical fitness.

A Symptom, Not the Underlying Cause: Common Core Isn’t the Problem

Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there was debate about an educational initiative known as Common Core.

The debate was and remains fierce, with some passionately opposed, and others enthusiastically supporting. State legislatures accepted, rejected, or proposed compromise modifications of Common Core.

But whichever side one takes in the discussion about Common Core, it’s possible that citizens are missing the real point. Common Core is merely one example of a larger phenomenon.

People might be focusing on a tree but not seeing the forest.

There is and has been a plentiful supply of educational initiatives: Outcome-Based Education, New Math, Every Child Counts, No Child Left Behind, Authentic Assessment, Mastery Learning, Inquiry-Based Education, Purpose-Centered Education, Saxon Math, Small Schools Movement, Standards-Based Education, Student-Centered Learning, and many more.

Each of these, and the countless others which could be added to the list, contains a few nuggets of wisdom buried in a large amount of nonsense.

The problem isn’t Common Core. The problem is the tidal wave of programs and trends which regularly deluge public, and sometimes private, schools.

These schemes can, and should, all be dismissed out-of-hand. Why?

The problems with such strategies are at least twofold: first, they are formulated at the national level; second, they involve the legislative and executive branches of the federal and state governments.

Any nationwide proposal necessarily neglects the local variables. Schools are organized best when they are organized locally. Each city, town, or county has its own unique character, and effective education must pay attention to the features which constitute that spirit.

There will be significant shortcomings in any educational plan which was created by, or processed through, either the legislative branch or the executive branch. Education is best done apart from the government.

The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, as well as the Land Ordinance of 1785, provided for public education, but did not presume to direct the nature of that education. The shaping of the school was left to the local community, and out of the hands of state and federal governments.

While it is certainly a fine intellectual exercise to analyze various educational proposals, it’s important not to get too caught up in the advantages and disadvantages of any one plan. Any initiative that’s a product of the political process, and any initiative which claims to be a nationwide solution, is a priori wrong.

Concerning the Common Core program in particular, a report from Mercury Radio Arts states:

Stanford professor emeritus James Milgram was the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, and he refused to sign off on the proposed standards because he believed they were too weak. In testimony to the Texas legislature, Milgram explained that the standards were “in large measure a political document that … is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

Local, not national, efforts offer the best results in the global educational competition. To be sure, education is a competition, on both national and international levels.

If each town, city, or country has the opportunity to explore its own academic programs, then many different initiatives can be simultaneously explored.

One of Milgram’s objections was that the standards instruct schools to not teach algebra until ninth grade. Milgram and other math experts note that saving algebra until high school means that students won’t be introduced to precalculus until college (assuming they even choose that route).

One perennial concern which reappears in these discussions is that America might be sending too many students to college. Which percentage of high school graduates needs a four-year degree? Are we producing too many university diplomas?

Meanwhile, we might have too few skilled workers in those fields which don’t require four-year degrees. Welders, tool and die makers, draftsmen, etc., are in short supply, and despite our transition to an information economy, are still needed.

This does not come as a surprise to those who put Common Core together. Jason Zimba, a professor at Bennington College and the lead writer of the math standards, acknowledged as much to the (Baton Rouge) Advocate. “If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core,” he said. Zimba also admitted that students following Common Core would likely be precluded from “attending elite colleges” since the Core is “not aligned with the expectations at the collegiate level.”

Each city, town, and county should wrestle through these questions for itself, and ignore national and political proposals. Indeed, there should be no national or political proposals.

How can we bring an end to ceaseless production of such schemes? Perhaps the simplest answer would be to give them no attention: no media time, no public debate. Ignore educational theorists. Starve bad ideas by giving them no consideration.

What’s Really a Problem: Evaluating America’s Campuses

Universities are traditionally laboratories for the fertile, if bizarre, imaginations of young people. Universities are places in which new ideas can be auditioned. Sometimes, they’re simply entertaining jokes. Other times, they may represent breakthroughs which can be applied in the real world.

For this reason, universities are almost synonymous with tolerance. Students need the freedom to experiment with new thoughts. Was Martin Schongauer a communist? Most probably not. But if an undergraduate wants to write a persuasive essay claiming that he was, the university is the right place to do that.

There is, however, a point at which the freedom to experiment becomes its opposite: a disincentive to a creative life of the mind. In a consumer model of education, students become customers, and instead of provoking them to wrestle with complex and challenging ideas, universities make them comfortable with familiar ideas.

A student who wants to explore challenging concepts is a student with the self-discipline to work at that task. By contrast, a student who’s arrived at the university to have a four-year experience of campus life doesn’t want to be bothered with the intellectual effort required to parse the thoughts of a Kant or a Schopenhauer.

So some of the usual campus weirdness and oddity is harmless. But when college administrators begin to cater to students instead of challenging them, damage is being done both to the individual and to society, as author Tom Nichols writes:

This is a deeper problem than the usual stunts, fads, and intellectual silliness on campuses that capture the public imagination from time to time. There will always be a certain amount of foolishness to a lot of campus life. As a Tufts University professor, Dan Drezner, has written, “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are.” College life, especially at the most elite schools, is insulated from society, and when young people and intellectuals are walled off from the real world, strange things can happen.

When institutions entertain students instead of educating them, the net amount of educating declines. Students need to accumulate information and skills - knowing that and knowing how.

Under the banner of social justice, some aspects of higher education have been reduced to confirming students in their already-held beliefs. In such systems, they gain neither knowledge nor skills, as scholar Robert Bork writes:

The result of our egalitarian passion is that Americans, white as well as black, have allowed themselves to become progressively less competent. That fact is attested to in myriad ways: SAT scores keep declining; American students fall well behind the students of many other nations on international science and mathematics tests; even college students frequently lack basic historical and geographical knowledge. Our system of public education at the primary and secondary levels is not performing as well as it did half a century ago, and in places its performance is a disgrace. Universities must offer remedial courses to bring their entering freshmen up to the point they should have reached in mid-high school. Less and less of the four years of college can be spent on what we used to think of as college level studies. Intellectual rigor inevitably suffers as grades are inflated and graduate students are substituted for professors in teaching undergraduates.

Sometimes standardized tests like the ACT or SAT are recalibrated, but there’s no hiding the fact that intellectual activity among some college students is declining.

The good news is that, for students shrewd enough to avoid social justice and political correctness, an education can still be gotten at most universities and colleges. There are professors who are still subject matter specialists, and there are still classes in which students wrestle with significant texts like Parmenides, Xenophanes, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, John Locke, Edmund Burke, etc.

As the mind struggles with complex text, it grows and becomes stronger; in avoiding social justice, it encounters justice simpliciter.

Students who are willing to see beyond mere career training will find that, in obscure and even deliberately hidden corners of the university, the life of the mind still persists. Their imaginations can be fueled as they encounter academic rigor.

What is now needed is for more students to take this path, sharpening their minds instead of accumulating experiences.

Higher Education and Its Changing Role in American Society: Upholding Civilization or Undermining It?

Colleges and universities were a part of the United States even before the nation began in 1776. By the time the country was founded, it featured several institutions of higher learning.

The role which those schools play and played in American culture has changed over the centuries and decades. They started as academies for a small percentage of the population. The majority of people had no interest in attending college, whether or not it was possible for them.

The bulk of the citizens could achieve a comfortable middle class standard of living without a university education, and, in those previous centuries, secondary educations were good enough to provide a stimulating life of the mind.

In that era, a rigorous curriculum in a broad array of subjects was available to those who pursued learning up to, but not into, college. Without going to a university, students could immerse their minds in the Greek and Roman classics, gain a working knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek, explore Shakespeare, and learn both ancient and modern history. In the natural sciences, chemistry, physics, and biology were available at advanced, if less well attended, levels. Arithmetic, mathematics, geometry, and trigonometry were taught at levels up to, and including, differential and integral calculus.

When a university education was needed for only a few professions, there was a greater emphasis within the university on developing the mind, rather than merely training for a profession, as scholar Tom Nicols writes:

Before World War II, most people did not finish high school and few went to college. In this earlier time, admissions to top schools were dominated by privileged families, although sometimes young men and a very few women could scrape up the money for tuition or earn a scholarship. It was an exclusive experience often governed as much by social class as by merit. Still, college attendance was an indication of potential, and graduation was a mark of achievement. A university degree was rare, serving as one of the signposts dividing experts and knowers from the rest of society.

When career training was less central to the university’s mission than it is now, other concerns could be more central: non-utilitarian scientific progress, the growth of individual freedom and political liberty, respect for the impartial rule of law, the traditions of rationality and skepticism, the study of culture, and the preservation of the great works and traditions of Western Civilization.

The university was clear to itself, and to the world, about its mission: to foster the life of the mind.

In a breathtakingly ironic oxymoron, the twenty-first century university is lurching toward anti-intellectualism: sometimes explicitly so, in the mocking of scholarly apparatuses like footnotes and bibliographies, and in the mocking of scholarly pursuits like the catalogues of Indo-European roots and their cognates in various World Languages.

But more often, the university’s anti-intellectualism is covert, because the institution still wants to demand the respect which is accorded to academic rigor. The trend is subversive, in the sense that an intellectual institution is infiltrated by individuals whose mission is to advance anti-intellectualism.

Thus arise the pseudo-sciences and pseudo-disciplines: courses and classes which have no intellectual or academic foundation. Thus, too, occurs the dilution of what had been rigorous academic pursuits: e.g., post-secondary studies of economics drift away from the meticulous precision of equations and graphs, and dissolve into a pool of slogans borrowed from popular politics.

The university’s goal is no longer to provide an individual with a stimulating life of the mind. To fill that vacuum, two alternative goals expand: career training and politicization applied to what had formerly been the objects of academic study, as scholar Robert Bork writes.

Universities now threaten to abandon those ideals and to instruct the rest of society to abandon them as well. As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.

In former times, a graduate who’d studied economics was considered to be a specialist in a quasi-mathematical study of human decisions, human actions, and the psychology which drives them. Now, however, someone with a college degree in economics is assumed to be someone who has opinions relevant to current partisan policy debates.

Whether the university undid itself, or whether electronic mass communication has undone it, the result is a declining life of the mind in America.