For an interesting critique of the international baccalaureat, from the other side of the Atlantic: http://www.cfam.org/publications/id.1737/pub_detail.asp
This particular website slams the IB’s ‘internationalist’ and ‘progressive’ agenda.
Interestingly, all GCSEs in Britain (though not necessarily IGCSEs) have to pay lipservice to environmental and ‘inclusivity’ concerns, whatever the academic discipline, following government diktats under Labour. Hence in recent GCSE and A-level papers from AQA, themes such as global warming, gay marriages, divorce, drugs etc have replaced the compulsory study of literature and a knowledge of the Past Historic tense.
In one GCSE French exam, the reading comprehension exam consisted of a postcard from a girl on holiday who said she could hear her parents rowing throught the thin walls of her hotel bedroom, and that she feared they would divorce; then an account by a young man who expressed his admiration for his strong and sensitive male friend, mentioning that the only girl he really knew was a drug addict who lived in the ground floor of his block of council flats. Depressing stuff … and the weirdest thing is that when gifted pupils take exams in French, German and Spanish (as they often do at Chavagnes International College, for example) and if they do the GCSE as opposed to the IGCSE, then they are confronted with more or less the same drivel in all three languages.
Catholic boarding schools 