International Education and IB Programmes

Abstract

It has been suggested that the International Baccalaureate Organization could be expected to ‘influence’ as many as 100 million people in the foreseeable future. This article focuses on some of the cultural dissonances that may be produced from attempts to ‘clone’ on to non-Eurocentric models, educational systems and methodologies designed to accommodate cultural norms in another part of the world. Cultures are dynamic entities and a certain repositioning of defining characteristics may be regarded as an acceptable, even desirable, consequence of adopting IB programmes and methodologies. This article argues that such outcomes need to be the product of intentional design and not accidental byproducts.