This chapter explores how the IB operationalises a critical education through its senior school leadership against a backdrop of privilege. It draws upon original interview and observation of six directors in world leading schools. It finds that leadership understands itself as a powerful catalyst for an IB Global Citizenship Education (GCE). However, IB international schools emerge as strongholds of white Anglo-Europeanism with endemic issues of inequity in staffing and thinking which privilege white expatriate staff and continue to reinforce Anglo superiority through an uncritical cosmopolitan education. By deploying the theory of Arendt, this chapter finds the schools struggle to initiate progressive action worthy of their IB mission due to a focus on words over action by appeasing wealth over challenging injustice. The chapter suggests more modelling and less talk of IB and Eastern values and recommends international educators should begin by tackling the injustices and inequities of the international schools themselves, thereby modelling critical thinking in action.
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This chapter takes the position that the world is facing crises of climate, inequality and truth with monumental implications for education. It contributes to knowledge in the area of international education and leadership. It acknowledges that International Baccalaureate (IB) international schools in the Asia-Pacific are ideally placed to champion emancipatory change and drive transformation. This is because the region is experiencing significant middle-class growth, and this demographic is defined by increased privilege and influence; able to levy change by decoupling from dominant white, Anglo-European perceptions of the world (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020b). Thanks to the IB, these schools have the thinking in place, yet face unresolved ontological issues of systematic inequity at the organisational level which require urgent resolution in schools’ policies (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020a; David, 2020), best illustrated by this quotation from a former international schools’ student in the Asia-Pacific;
There is such adulation of the Western world across the Global South; international schools need a conspicuous number of Western teachers to be deemed desirable by the local elite. Parents dream of sending their children to Ivy League schools, to Oxford and Cambridge. They want their kids to internalise whiteness as a standard. The denigration of our own cultures has been going on for so long, and enforces the narrative of Western superiority. (David, 2020)
Despite the perpetuation of the ‘international gaze’ in international schools (Gardner-McTaggart, 2019; 2020b), thinking and acting globally is important because we find ourselves in a planetary phase of human development. By this, I mean a period of human evolution which is now ‘global’; meaning that people’s issues, crises and futures are planetary, not national. This term invokes a progressive humanity without placing emphasis on business and commerce as is the case with the term ‘globalisation’ (Giddens, 2011; IPCC, 2018). Indeed, this new era requires different, decolonised, inclusive and collaborative ways of thinking (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020a) and Asia-Pacific thought represents an established alternative to its dominant and domineering Western counterpart. ‘Eastern’ philosophies are often considered to focus upon a cooperative humanity in contrast to an Enlightenment thinking that assumes human moral actions are predicated upon self-interest, and thus instrumental (Wootton, 2018) and ultimately less emancipatory. Consequently, schools, in this geographical context, and at this time, are places of life, defined by youth, learning, collaboration and interaction, which follow lofty, emancipatory ideals set out by the IB where quite literally ‘East meets West’ (Walker, 2010).
Implementing IB thinking is challenged by the pervasive instrumental exploitation of these progressive and humanist values for instrumental success (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020a). In leadership, this refers to the thin veneer of collegiality and plurality cloaking a managerialist agenda (Gunter, et al., 2017; Hartley, 2016). This chapter adds to knowledge on educational leadership in international education by advancing a political understanding of the Human Condition (Arendt, 1958) in order for well-intentioned educational leaders or school systems to reconceptualise the transformational change required to implement IB thinking conducive to action. This chapter also acknowledges a ‘window-dressing’ of global-mindedness and emancipatory thinking in international schools’ culture teleologically conjoined with strategic action, success (Habermas, 1981), and competition (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020a). This implies that many international schools utilise the lexis of IB thinking and progressive thought to tick boxes (David, 2020) and generate appeal in the tough market-place of private education (Gardner-McTaggart, 2018:a;b;c; 2019) masking an overtly Anglo-White reality (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020b; David, 2020). Such teleology bereft of ethics is entirely unsuited to the noble claims of IB educators, and so the political thought of Arendt becomes central in comprehending why school leaders manifest in this way, and what can be done about it.