By Gretchen Garrity
To most parents the International Baccalaureate program is a highly-respected organization that seeks to educate the brightest students with a world-class education, readying them for higher education and broader career opportunities. That perception could not be further from the truth.
The IB program is an organization that provides students with an education in Globalism and Marxism through a SEL (Social Emotional Learning) system that delivers indoctrination to every student enrolled. Just like many of the woke non-profit educational organizations that “serve” the government schools, the IB program is indoctrinating students (and their teachers) in a political system that is anathema to the values of our Republic.
James Lindsay describes SEL as, "...composed of psychological and social work–based interventions on children performed by teachers and other non-professionals (in psychology and social work) in uncontrolled, non-therapeutic spaces in order to teach them “right” and “wrong” answers to socially and emotionally relevant circumstances. Some, such as your humble encyclopedist, have suggested that the intentional implementation of Social-Emotional Learning in schools should be a felony and involve the relevant administrators going to prison. Some states in the United States, such as North Carolina, seemed to preemptively anticipate this potential issue with the implementation of SEL and proactively granted immunity to teachers and school faculty administering SEL against charges of practicing psychology on children without a license."
HISTORY OF THE IB PROGRAM
According to the IB organization’s website, the seeds of the IB program began in 1962 with the founding of the Atlantic College, one of the first educational institutions with an international curriculum. Founded by German educator, Kurt Hahn, the college as originally conceived was meant to bring understanding and cooperation among students in order to overcome Cold War hostilities among nations.
According to an article on Wikipedia, “Drawn from all nations, the students would be selected purely on merit and potential, regardless of race, religion, nationality and background.”
Remember that point, because if true, the IB program has largely abandoned that selection process in favor of the racist policies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
“KEY INFLUENTIAL EDUCATIONALISTS”
The IB organization names four individuals who were key to helping form the program’s ideas on curriculum: John Dewey, A.S. Neill, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner. Three of the four were psychologists.
Let’s take a look at socialist psychologist John Dewey.
According to author Samuel L. Blumenfeld in a 1985 Imprimis article¹, “In 1894 [Dewey] became professor of philosophy and education at the University of Chicago where he created his famous Laboratory School. The purpose of the school was to see what kind of curriculum was needed to produce socialists instead of capitalists, collectivists instead of individualists. Dewey, along with the other adherents of the new psychology, was convinced that socialism was the wave of the future and that individualism was passe. But the individualist system would not fade away on its own as long as it was sustained by the education American children were getting in their schools. According to Dewey, “…education is growth under favorable conditions; the school is the place where those conditions should be regulated scientifically.” In other words, if we apply psychology to education, which we have done now for over fifty years, then the ideal classroom is a psych lab and the pupils within it are laboratory animals.”
Also, according to Blumenfeld, “Dewey’s joining Cattell and Thorndike at Columbia brought together the lethal trio who were literally to wipe out traditional education and kill academic excellence in America. It would not be accomplished overnight, for an army of new teachers and superintendents had to be trained and an army of old teachers and superintendents had to retire or die off.”
John Dewey also felt that literacy was overrated. According to Blumenfeld, “But it was Dewey who identified high literacy as the culprit in traditional education, the sustaining force behind individualism. He wrote in 1898:
My proposition is, that conditions—social, industrial, and intellectual—have undergone such a radical change, that the time has come for a thoroughgoing examination of the emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary instruction…
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school-life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.”²
Dewey and his Progressive colleagues managed to introduce the “whole word” and “look say” methods of teaching reading, which were originally used to teach the deaf to read. The widespread implementation of these methods in public government schools has contributed to the drastic decline in literacy among our children. And it was done on purpose by one of the “key influential educationalists” the IB program touts.
Further, according to Aliya Sikandar in the Journal of Education and Educational Development, “Dewey was largely inspired by Marx’s theory of social struggle and conflict between classes. Marx’s theory of conflict is that the society is stratified and layered with different strata and there is a competition within these different classes. Marx stresses that social analysis should focus on class structure and relations. Dewey had an inspiration from Habermas’s thoughts, which are in the traditions of Kant, and emphasize the role of education to transform the world into a more humane, just, and egalitarian society.”³
Sikandar writes, “Dewey’s main concern was a disparity between the experiences of child and the kind of concepts imposed upon him. He believed that this gap curbs a child’s natural experiences and abilities, forcing him to follow the dictates of a formal education. Dewey is equally critical of the progressive education which imposes concepts, such as the right of free expression or free activity as these tenets of education also impose ideas upon a child. Dewey was deeply inspired by the vision of a liberal free society and realized the pressing need of freedom and equality, emancipation from social bounds to liberate individual and society from the structures of power.”⁴
These and other Progressive and Marxist ideas have morphed into the systems of delivery we see in today’s International Baccalaureate program, as well as public schools all over the nation. Hidden in the form of SEL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), these same pernicious ideas have been working to undermine and control the intellect of students.
EDUCATIONAL TRENDS
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| From History of the IB |
In its slide presentation on the history of the IB, the organization compares and contrasts traditional and progressive educational trends. Traditional methods such as memorization are compared to “critical analysis.” Testing goes from objective IQ tests to a “range of skills testing.” A didactic or moral-based teaching becomes “constructivism,” in which a child develops his/her own moral understanding through experiential methods of learning. Machine-scored tests become criterion-referenced tests.
In a nutshell, these progressive trends mean that objective testing for IQ and content mastery, a shared curriculum that all students should master, and a moral base for knowledge is all thrown out the window in the service of indoctrinating children into a globalist, Marxist world view.
Indeed, a great deal of the IB program is designed for this end. Recently, the IB put out a DEI statement to read in part:
“Diversity, equity and inclusion statement:
We aim to live these values through these commitments:
The IB will embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in our work—and reflect this commitment as we develop our policies and procedures—both as an employer and as an educational organization
We commit to promoting human rights and the idea of one shared humanity in all our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization
The IB commits to promoting justice—social, economic and ecological—in our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization
Alongside our community, we will work to help protect the environment and the local ecosystems that form it
The IB will foster a sense of agency and enquiry in both the people we work with and the young people we help to educate
We embrace learner variability so that our learners are not excluded on the grounds of any of their characteristics, and so that our stakeholders can develop and thrive in a culture of equal opportunities for learning, personal growth, and developing the ability to make positive change
The IB commits to act supportively and with consideration for young people affected by difficult or adverse circumstances, their own changing personal histories or contexts, or other challenges affecting their life as IB students
We will work to promote the voices, identities, and leadership of marginalized people in our work, both as an employer and as an educational organization. We will be transparent in all our policies relating to the people we work with and as we work with our educational programmes and resources through a diversity, equity and inclusion lens
We will explore new ways to open our programmes and our work to new languages, cultures and contexts
The IB commits to being fully focused on the needs of our staff, IB World Schools and their educators and students, as we challenge ourselves to become a more diverse, open, inclusive, and accepting organization, standing against racism, prejudice, discrimination and marginalization wherever we can. “
It is clear that a political persuasion is of utmost importance to the IB. Words like diversity, equity, inclusion, promoting human rights, justice, protecting the environment, promoting the leadership of marginalized people, etc., are all the wording of today’s Marxist lexicon. Cloaked in benign-sounding wording, these concepts mean something very different to those imposing them on our children. And unfortunately, many public schools have fallen for the IB program, including the Ozark School District.
OZARK SCHOOL DISTRICT AND THE IB
At the Sept. 21, 2023 Ozark School Board meeting, the IB program (a part of the school since 2012), was evaluated. The presenters, Ozark High School Principal Dr. Jeremy Brownfield and IB coordinator Stacie Moran, spoke in favor of the program. The slide presentation can be found here. Video prompted to the IB presentation:
The slide presentation, as clever as it was in attempting to downplay the actual IB cost versus AP cost (in purely financial terms), could not hide the taxpayer dollar waste as compared to the Advanced Placement program. What wasn’t readily seen in the slides is that the IB program for 2024 will cost taxpayers $228,246.80 for a total of 74 students (the majority of whom will not be in the diploma program). The diploma program currently has a total of 28 students, both seniors and juniors. Dividing the total cost by the number of students comes out to $3,084.42 for the IB program, while the AP program calculation is a total of $871.64 per student.
What Dr. Brownfield did in his calculations was to compare total “student seats” (how many classes were taken by each student), instead of program cost per student. And when one compares the policies of colleges regarding both the AP and IB programs (see slide 12 of the presentation), the cost to taxpayers cannot justify the IB program. The ROI (return on investment) is not there.
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| Slide 12 of OSD IB Presentation |
Later in the presentation, the call is for expanding the IB program to the Middle Years Program, hiring additional staff and training. The purely financial aspects of the IB program should see it dropped by the Ozark School District. However, the political indoctrination alone should be the stake in the heart of the IB program.
IB STUDENTS SPEAK AT TOWN HALL
At an Ozark School District Town Hall meeting on December 7, 2023, a student in the IB program got up to speak. It starts out well. The student describes her involvement at school and asks a great question of the school board: What is the best form of education? Board member Patty Quessenberry launches right into the progressive view of student-directed education. She pays lip service to a “baseline,” but then affirms that what interests the student is the most important avenue of learning.
Next, board member Guy Callaway says nearly the same thing. He mentions that his niece had been in the IB program. Board member Christina Tonsing requests input from the students about the Academies program (read about them here,) and shares that educational trends tend to come and go.
Then Don Currence, the mayor of Ozark, speaks about some controversial opinions that had been shared on a Ozark community Facebook page. Another IB student gets up to speak. She wants more money for the arts. She’s already spoken to Principal Dr. Jeremy Brownfield, but she “wants more details.” Partnerships with local arts organizations is mentioned as a possible solution. School board member Amber Bryant shares that a cost analysis is being done.
It’s wonderful up to this point. But at the 40-minute mark one of the two IB students gets up again to ask about the Ozark community page on Facebook previously mentioned by Mayor Currence. She wants to get rid of it. She wants to censor free speech in order to protect her teachers and fellow students. Later at 44 minutes in, a woman gets up and suggests teaching “media literacy,” which is a form of censorship masked as educating students how to discern mis- and disinformation.
WHAT IS MEDIA LITERACY?
John D. Sailor of the National Association of Scholars describes it this way: “But what, exactly, is this pedagogy? The Critical Media Literacy Guide, a book by UCLA professors Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, offers a broad and influential summary. Kellner and Share cite Marx’s observation that “in every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class” to argue that media literacy should be taught through the lens of power and identity groups. Critical media literacy seeks to undermine what it sees as the dominant institutions of Western capitalist society—or, to use the academic jargon, to foster “counter-hegemonic alternatives.”⁵
In the video, which I urge you to watch from the prompt onward, then Interim-Superintendent Lori Wilson, and Curriculum Superintendent Craig Carson both admit that media literacy is being taught to very young students up through high school.
Towards the end of the meeting, one of the IB students asks a question regarding helping recent immigrants from Ukraine and Russia by “growing” curriculum to make it “less of a culture shock.”
Perhaps the globalist perspective taught in the IB curriculum is what prompted the remarks in favor of censoring free speech on Facebook (hardly known as a bastion of free speech anyway), and concern for recent immigrants’ cultural sensibilities.
Also during the meeting Ozark School Board Member Christina Tonsing asked about UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), which has been historically associated with the IB program. According to J. P. Singh in “United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Creating norms for a complex world,” “Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) “Religion of Humanity” ascribed to science the basis of society and global solidarity that would replace God as its ordering principle. Comte’s positivist theory of humanity reflected science to be not just a source for Enlightenment ideas of progress, but also to be its spiritual core. Comte provides a precursor to the ideas of scientific humanism that became popular in the 1930s. Julian Huxley, UNESCO’s first director- general (1946–48), tried to provide a similar manifesto in his pamphlet UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy: “Thus the general philosophy of UNESCO should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background.”8 The thrust of Huxley’s ideas was toward human perfection rooted in natural selection, evolution, and one dangerously close to eugenics.”⁶
Kimberly Ells writes about UNESCO in her article “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society.” Ells says, “[A]ccording to the global purveyor of SEL standards, 27 states so far have adopted K-12 SEL competencies, and all 50 states have adopted SEL competencies for pre-K students. But where is this massive push for SEL coming from, and what are the motives behind it? The answer to this question is becoming clear: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is a primary force behind the SEL movement worldwide.”⁷
Later in the article, Ells asserts that UNESCO is ultimately concerned with making global citizens who, “In short, proponents of the sustainable development goals and SEL want to instill “pluralistic thinking” in your child in the name of global peace. They want children to be taught to value the “collective good” over individual liberties, rights, and property despite the fact that the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are founded on individual liberties, rights, and property.”⁸
WHAT CAN WE DO?
This is the crux of the matter with organizations like the International Baccalaureate program and UNESCO. They are not in unity with the laws, values, and culture of the United States of America. In fact, through deception and clever wording, these organizations and many like them have been subverting our educational institutions for decades.
The hour is quite late. These organizations have not just a toehold, but a stranglehold on our institutions. Parents and taxpayers should insist that programs like the IB be dropped from the curriculum at the Ozark School District. Teachers should be retrained if needed.
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¹Samuel Blumenfeld, “Who Killed Excellence?” Imprimis, Sept. 1985, Volume 14, Issue 9, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-killed-excellence/
²Samuel Blumenfeld, “Who Killed Excellence?” Imprimis, Sept. 1985, Volume 14, Issue 9, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-killed-excellence/
³Aliya Sikandar, “John Dewey and His Philosophy of Education, Journal of Education and Educational Development, Vol. 2 No. 2 (December 2015) 191-201, file:///tmp/mozilla_gigi0/John_Dewey_and_His_Philosophy_of_Education.pdf
⁴Aliya Sikandar, “John Dewey and His Philosophy of Education, Journal of Education and Educational Development, Vol. 2 No. 2 (December 2015) 191-201, file:///tmp/mozilla_gigi0/John_Dewey_and_His_Philosophy_of_Education.pdf
⁵John D. Sailor, “Media Literacy’s False Promise,” City Journal, Aug. 16, 2021, https://www.city-journal.org/article/media-literacys-false-promise
⁶J.P. Singh, Introduction to “United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: Creating norms for a complex world,” (2011), https://jpsingh.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Singh-UNESCO-Front-Matter-Intro.pdf
⁷Kimberly Ells, “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society,” The Federalist, Aug. 23, 2022, https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/23/un-program-teaching-kids-social-and-emotional-learning-actually-seeks-to-kill-their-individualism/
⁸ Kimberly Ells, “The endgame of Social and Emotional Learning programs the UN is pushing is to shape all children to meet the needs of a global society,” The Federalist, Aug. 23, 2022, https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/23/un-program-teaching-kids-social-and-emotional-learning-actually-seeks-to-kill-their-individualism/
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