East is East and west is west.

This position paper addresses the long-standing criticism that the International Baccalaureate (IB) is too closely associated with Western values and, despite its title, does not enable students to see the world from a truly international perspective. Considering evidence from different authorities, it analyses the IB learner profile and asks how appropriate it is for the cultures of East Asia. The paper concludes that the learner profile does indeed reflect the strong Western humanist foundations of the IB, but accepts that the organization’s successful growth (not least in its AsiaPacific region) makes sudden change unlikely and undesirable. Instead, it recommends that the learner profile be reviewed regularly and used as a focus for internal debate on this issue. It also proposes that some limited regional variation be encouraged in order gradually to seize “the great opportunity for the creation of new thought by a new combination of truths” (Tagore 1961: 222). Introduction The perceived character of an organization will be made up of many contributing factors: its history which, for the IB, was largely European in origin; the cultural mix of its staff; the style of its governance; the location of its workplaces and the languages of its discourse. This paper, however, focuses specifically on the IB’s programmes and, in particular, on the principles underpinning them. These are described in the IB learner profile (IB 2006) which “is based on values that are the embodiment of what the organization believes about international education” (IB 2008: 3). The IB’s first director general Alec Peterson (1987: 199) admitted: there have been numerous criticisms of the IB recently on the grounds that it is too dominated by the demands of university entrance, not genuinely international enough, too Western oriented and too academic. At the time fewer than 10% of IB schools were located in its Asia-Pacific region, a figure that has doubled today. The longest serving director general of the IB Roger Peel (Tarc 2009: 56) voiced his concern: Our programme of study tends to be different from that of national systems of education. But is it truly international? I think not. It is undoubtedly demanding and yet it also remains conventional in many of its parts. Its European ancestry is still dominant. The present author (Walker 2004: 51) admitted to an audience in Canada: For the moment I do not know how this issue can be addressed beyond saying that (one) objective of international education is to encourage its students to appreciate the diverse modes of learning of which Western humanism is one. Understandably, some international educators have taken a less sympathetic line. Quist (2005: 5), for example, describes the current discourse on international education as