Any parent wanting their child to take the International Baccalaureate should be warned: the workload is going to be heavy. Prepare to hear your child whine about extended essays, and how their friends doing A-levels have it much easier.
The International Baccalaureate, or IB, requires pupils to take six main subjects alongside a mandatory course in Theory of Knowledge (basic epistemology), as well as a number of hours of creativity, action and service classes, and an interdisciplinary extended essay. Diploma candidates must take mathematics, a science, a first language as well as a second language (English can be either), a humanities subject and an arts subject. Three of the six are taken to a higher level. Some schools will allow pupils more than six subjects, but that’s showing off.
Some of the qualification’s detractors say that its sheer breadth produces superficial generalists with a transatlantic twang. IB graduates, they argue, are burdened by subjects they don’t need in later life. It distracts them from the essentials.
My own experience suggests otherwise. Ten years after passing my IB, I can still remember how the Krebs cycle works from my IB standard-level biology class, and the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic are as almost as fresh in my memory as they were when I sat my philosophy higher-level exams. Both have stood me in good stead, and not just in pub quizzes.
In recent years, I have watched my siblings thrive under the challenges of the IB. I have seen them develop analytical skills and apply them to the world literature course, and relish the mandatory, interdisciplinary extended essay through which they can focus on one of a wide range of subjects from bioethics to the economics of urban planning. They have all gone to Ivy League universities.
The diploma, founded in Geneva in 1968, has its roots in post-war internationalism. Its curriculum, with its heavy focus on the interdisciplinary study, was drawn from Is There a Way of Teaching for Peace?, an educational handbook written for Unesco at the end of the 1940s by Marie-Thérèse Maurette.
The International Baccalaureate now offers not just the diploma but also a GCSE-level ‘middle years’ programme for ages 11 to 16 and a ‘primary years’ programme, but these are not yet as widely available. Increasingly secondary schools in Britain have either switched to the IB or run it alongside the A-level qualification because the programme
is considered more rigorous than A-levels. Today there are approximately 140 schools in Britain which offer the IB, and not just in the private sector.
Teenagers who enjoy a challenge, who like being given free rein and to a certain degree shaping their own curriculum, will do well under the IB system, which encourages independent thought and initiative.
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