Changing Times
Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson, Centre for
the study of education in an international context, Department of
Education, University of Bath UK
By global education standards, the international school is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although the claim to be the first international school
is contested in places as far apart as Yokohama and Geneva, and no
doubt others in between, the problem of defining the nature of such an
institution remains just as elusive as does its origin. One thing,
however, is certain about our understanding of the international school.
The institution as such has been in a developing state from its
inception; w may know surprisingly little about where the graph of
growth has its precise origin but it is possible to recognise a number
of stages in the evolutionary process.
From before the turn of the twentieth century, there existed schools
with the sole purpose of enabling young people to experience their
continuing education in a culture other than that in which they had
been educated earlier in their lives. The exodus of American youth to
such schools in Europe, and the intra-European transfer of students
between schools in different countries, to be ‘finished’ before
entering a profession or progressing to university education, are
examples.
Such schools were characterised not so much by their ‘international’
nature but by the fact that they catered for ‘displaced’ students, that
is for students who found themselves in an institution which was in a
culturally, if not educationally, different environment from that which
they had experienced as part of their earlier education.
The increasing number of intergovernmental personnel associated with
the burgeoning diplomatic activity between the two World Wars, created
a need for educational institutions to provide appropriate education
for the sons and daughters of itinerant personnel who sought an
alternative to keeping their children in the ‘home country’ but away
from the family. Often such schools were designed form he outset to be
‘national schools away from home’ (French Lycées, German Gymnasia,
English Grammar-type schools) ensuring ease of access for students
re-entering the home-country for university education purposes.
Many such schools still exist. But other schools were also developed
during this period which were created from more ideological
perspectives in an attempt to base an education on the emerging
principles for global human development arising from, for example, the
League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. In the so-called
underdeveloped parts of the world especially, the needs of such an
itinerant group of students were often met through the creation of
schools by missionaries and other Church authorities. Around the early
1960s it was claimed that 50 or so ‘international schools’ existed.
That situation was to change throughout the succeeding decades, as
the improving prosperity of many industrially-based economies generated
a second demographic shift, this time involving he commercial and
business communities in the transfer of he numbers of personnel around
the world, creating a nomadic group of workers and their families. The
response from the international education community to this increase in
both number of potential clients and in the diversity of population was
to generate an equivalent diversity in provision. In addition to an
increase in what by that time had become almost a traditional pattern
of national schools overseas, there was also an upsurge in those
schools which were quite clearly market, rather than ideologically,
driven.
That is not to say that ideologically-driven schools did not also
increase in number; indeed, this they did through the development of
the series of United World Colleges and the European Schools network,
for example. To stereotype any of the schools in existence then, or
now, as purely market-driven or ideologically-driven would be to do
less than justice to the situation in which many schools find
themselves, striving for the highest academic ideals and standards
within a resource-constrained context. Each school will, at any one
point in its own history, have resolved its position on the continuum
from profit motive to educational ideality in terms of its own
circumstances prevailing at that time.
The process of resolution of the conundrum implicit in the economic
versus international education tug-of-war has been assisted by a number
of important developments in a range of parameters in the international
education equation. One of the most important has been the development,
over the past 25 years or so, of an international approach to the
formal curriculum of elementary and secondary schools.
Perhaps the best known of these, at the upper secondary level, is the International Baccalaureate
(IB) [Diploma] Programme, together with the Advanced International
Certificate of Education (AICE) of the University of Cambridge Local
Examinations Syndicate and the International Advanced Placement
programme of the College Board.
At lower and middle secondary level the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and the International Baccalaureate
Middle Years Programme (IBMYP) are now well established, as are a range
of qualifications from British Examination Groups designed for overseas
schools, whilst at the elementary school level the recently introduced International Baccalaureate
Primary Years Programme (IBPYP) has offered the prospect of a
continuous K-12 approach to international education in any one
institution. The International Schools Association is itself attempting to design such an International Education System.
Attractive as all of these formal programmes are, it has become
clear through our researches at the University of Bath that it is for
each individual school to make its own unique response to the challenge
of providing a truly international education for a very special
population of young people. But in doing so every institution can be
assisted in the process by sharing of good practice and by a commitment
to individual and institutional development, activities which lie at
the core of our own work at Bath and to which we, in turn, are
committed in our partnership with the international network of schools
worldwide.
Published in Guide to International Schools 1998
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