International Baccalaureate Organization

Origins

The IBDP originated from the practical need to create an international examination that would be accepted in many countries, each of which had its own standards for university admission, and from a desire to counter the prevailing systems of nationalist education that had contributed to the fracture of European society in World War I. In the 1920s and 1930s, the first tentative steps toward the development of a standardized international school curriculum were made in Geneva, Switzerland, where children of officials of the League of Nations and the International Labor Office attended the École Internationale. The Great Depression and World War II interrupted any progress that was being made toward the development of an international diploma.

In the decades following World War II, the increase in international trade and global politics and the concomitant increase in mobility caused the issue to be raised again. In 1949, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sponsored a conference in Paris from which emerged a recommendation that an international diploma be created that would require a long research paper and a second language. Nothing came of this recommendation until 1963, when Robert J. Leach, the social studies department chair at École Internationale in Geneva, received a grant from UNESCO to develop internationally minded courses in geography and history. Social studies were the content areas that presented the greatest challenges to international schools as curricula in these subjects tended to be national and often nationalistic in scope. In 1963, Leach and others set up the International Schools Examination Syndicate (ISES) in order to develop examinations with grants secured from the Twentieth Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The plan was welcomed by several prestigious international schools, including the United World College of the Atlantic (UWC) in Wales and the United Nations International School (UNIS) in New York. The syndicate's first director was A. D. C. Peterson, the director of the department of educational studies at [Page 477]Oxford University. A. D. C. Peterson, Desmond Cole of UNIS, and Harlan Hanson, director of the College Board Advanced Placement Program in the United States, created the program of study that became the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. Unlike the American Advanced Placement Program, which offers students the opportunity to choose advanced courses on an individual basis, the Europeans envisioned the IBDP as a total curriculum structured around a set of ideals. Hanson convinced Peterson and Cole that in addition to the diploma, provision should be made for students to earn certificates for completing individual courses without completing the diploma. This provision would contribute to the expansion of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in North American schools in the 1980s and beyond, as American universities would recognize the IB for advanced placement rather than for admission.

...