George Walker, newly appointed Director-General of the International Baccalaureate, looks at learning beyond local frontiers

It may be over four hundred years old, but it is hard to improve upon the French essayist, Montaigne’s, justification for an international education:

“Mixing with the world has a marvellously clarifying effect on a man’s judgement. We are all confined and pent up within ourselves and our clear sight has contracted to the length of our noses. When someone asked Socrates of what county he was he did not reply ‘of Athens’, but ‘of the world’.”

Of course, Socrates in the fourth century BC, and Montaigne, writing in 1580, had very different conceptions of ‘the world’ to those we have today. However, our contemporary image of the planet earth viewed from outer space would only have lent support to their conviction that education must extend beyond local frontiers.

And, indeed, most schools throughout the world have tried to encourage an international perspective through the study of history and geography, literature and languages. For many young people it was their school that provided them with their earliest experience of foreign travel, opening their eyes to new foods, religions and languages and different ways of going about things - in short, to different cultures.

But in 1924 a new kind of education was pioneered when the first international school was founded in Geneva. Two reasons lay behind its creation. First, it would serve the children of a new internationally mobile workforce - the civil servants of the recently created League of Nations and International Labour Office. Second, it would seek to develop a new style of education designed to support the ideals of the League - an ‘international education.’ This uncomfortable blend of practicality and idealism continues to drive the thousand or so international schools that have since grown up around the world.

Seventy-five years after the founding of the International School of Geneva, the debate continues about what constitutes a truly international education. Alongside, and interacting with the schools themselves, is a growing industry of conferences, workshops, books, articles and academic theses, all trying to hunt down that elusive definition. Happily, there is agreement on many points, and on one in particular there is unanimity - an essential aspect of an international education is acquiring a better understanding of, and sensitivity towards, different cultures. Socrates and Montaigne would certainly have approved.
If only it were that simple! Finding an acceptable definition of ‘culture’ is not the problem and most people would readily take the one offered by UNESCO:

“the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterise a society or a social group.”

Nor would anyone deny the significance of culture in our everyday lives. For TS Eliot, for example, culture was quite simply what ‘makes life worth living’ and the culture of a group has been likened to the water surrounding a fish essential to its life, but having no significance for the fish, until it is removed.

However, those who are seriously interested in the practice of international education, wanting to move beyond the ‘rubbing shoulders’ comfort-zone of international cuisine and the celebration of different religious festivals, will soon find a range of rather awkward questions looming up.

For example: what style of teaching will be the most effective in developing cultural understanding? The obvious answer would seem to be an open, questioning style that brings students and teachers together in interactive mode. But that would ignore powerful research evidence that shows how students from some cultural backgrounds, Japan and many Middle Eastern countries, for example, find the student-teacher relationship implied in that style an affront to some deeply held values within their societies.

Moving on, we ask next what educational experiences will encourage our students to think and act more globally in recognition of the growing interdependence of nation states. Is there, perhaps, a global culture whose universal values will help to overcome the dangerous rivalries of different nations? How can we continue to strengthen a ‘culture of necessity’, recognising that our future security and even survival will come from cooperation rather than competition? Put more simply, do our schools care any longer about the future of the United Nations?

It seems probable that an understanding of one’s own culture provides the best platform from which to explore the culture of others. So what kind of education is most appropriate for the increasing number of so-called Third Culture Kids who make up the mobile population of most international schools? They belong neither to the culture of their passport country, nor of their current host country. Instead, they have developed their own distinctive ‘third culture’ which features great adaptability and impressive linguistic skills but no deep sense of belonging. Is this, as has been suggested, the prototype citizen of the twenty-first century?

Finally, we arrive at every teacher’s dilemma. On the one hand, a student’s strong cultural identity is a source of stability bringing a sense of belonging but it can also become confining, in the words of the eminent American psychologist, Jerome Bruner, a ‘one-way street’. At what point does the teacher suggest a way out, that will lead the student to greater choice and diversity but perhaps at the cost of greater confusion and lack of identity?

These, then, are some of the issues that are challenging those of us who work in the field of international education but let no one suppose they are confined to the so-called international schools. On the contrary, they affect every school that seeks to encourage its students to look beyond the length of their noses and to mix with the world.

George Walker is Director-General of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. He was previously Director-General of the International School of Geneva.

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