The International Baccalaureate Organization is an educational non-profit whose mission may ultimately be world peace.
Seriously. Here is their mission statement:
Seriously. Here is their mission statement:
"The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.
To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.
These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right."
In a nutshell, right after World War II and with the Cold War looking pretty bleak, a group of American and European education leaders were motivated by the following line of thought: Were there things that our (then) current leaders, members of the UN, could have learned that would have made warfare less likely than it seemed? What do we need to be teaching our young people to empower them to make the world more peaceful?
According to the IBO, this conversation was started by a woman named Marie-Thérèse Maurette, who was the director of the International School of Geneva in Switzerland. She wrote an essay entitled, "Is there a way of teaching for peace?" in 1948. It was another 22 years before the first IB exams were given, and after 67 years the IB is still dedicated to answering that question with an increasingly elaborate yes.
So what do extremely rigorous high school courses and exams have to do with world peace? Well, the primary insight was that throughout world history, there have been people whose respective countries were fighting each other but they did not care because they were studying something together: Athenians and Spartans during the Peloponnesian War, Germans and Americans during World War II, etc...while most of their countrymen were fighting, mathematicians, physicists and astronomers from opposing sides studied together peacefully. When you are inspired by the goal of helping each other figure things out, bloodshed is a waste of time. That is the connection.
For the record, every facet of the IB Program connects to that mission in some way. Notice that underneath the entirety of the curriculum model is the premise of "International Mindedness." World peace is certainly a lofty goal, but hopefully one that an IB education may contribute to.