Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on May 3, 2008 - 22:15.
As a former IB student, I can say that in all seriousness IB students are not taught anything of the sort. IB is not part of the ambiguous "UN agenda" that people love to shake their fists at; IB students are not taught that the "Constitution is no longer viable." IB also has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism or any other extreme political ideology. As a person who considers myself a proud patriot, I am baffled and frankly a little insulted by the kind of rhetoric that labels something to which I dedicated a big part of my educational career as "treason."
What we were taught in IB were the cold, hard facts of world civilization: the UN exists, many countries (including the US *GASP*) were involved in its founding, it has a charter that its member states are at least somewhat obliged to uphold, it has a role to play in mediating international affairs, and sometimes its directives don't coincide with its member states' sovereign interests. Radical observers looking for some kind of New World Order indoctrination camp will be bitterly disappointed if they actually sat in on an IB European History class.
One thing we did learn about, however, was the idea of the false dilemma. This is an argumentative device that people use frequently to get a poorly-supported rhetorical conclusion across. People resorting to the false dilemma assert that in a given circumstance, there are only two possible positions that can be taken (usually in glaring contrast to one another) when other options actually exist. An example of this is saying something like, "either you reject the United Nations as a godless world-government conspiracy and demand that the US should have no part in it OR you're an America-hating globalist communist who wants to burn the Constitution and export our sovereignty to Moscow or France..."
Comments from a former IB student
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on May 3, 2008 - 22:15.
As a former IB student, I can say that in all seriousness IB students are not taught anything of the sort. IB is not part of the ambiguous "UN agenda" that people love to shake their fists at; IB students are not taught that the "Constitution is no longer viable." IB also has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism or any other extreme political ideology. As a person who considers myself a proud patriot, I am baffled and frankly a little insulted by the kind of rhetoric that labels something to which I dedicated a big part of my educational career as "treason."
What we were taught in IB were the cold, hard facts of world civilization: the UN exists, many countries (including the US *GASP*) were involved in its founding, it has a charter that its member states are at least somewhat obliged to uphold, it has a role to play in mediating international affairs, and sometimes its directives don't coincide with its member states' sovereign interests. Radical observers looking for some kind of New World Order indoctrination camp will be bitterly disappointed if they actually sat in on an IB European History class.
One thing we did learn about, however, was the idea of the false dilemma. This is an argumentative device that people use frequently to get a poorly-supported rhetorical conclusion across. People resorting to the false dilemma assert that in a given circumstance, there are only two possible positions that can be taken (usually in glaring contrast to one another) when other options actually exist. An example of this is saying something like, "either you reject the United Nations as a godless world-government conspiracy and demand that the US should have no part in it OR you're an America-hating globalist communist who wants to burn the Constitution and export our sovereignty to Moscow or France..."