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mong the curricula used in the international schools operating in the country, the Baccalaureate Curriculum has emerged as the newfangled benchmark in primary, middle and secondary education here.

Originated from and founded in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland, the International Baccalaureate (IB), formerly the International Baccalaureate Organization, is known as an international educational foundation.

Its adoption in many international schools operating here is motivated primarily by the appeals this curriculum offers. For one thing, this curriculum is said to encompass universal values and norms of shared humanity.

It aims to nurture in its students a sense of love, caring, responsibility, compassion, intercultural understanding, critical thinking and tolerance.

For another, the IB curriculum stresses the importance of promoting students to become active participants in the process of knowledge construction by positioning themselves as inclusive beings.

With the students coming from diverse cultural and multilingual backgrounds, the IB certainly provides students with access to developing sensitivity and heightening awareness of embracing inclusiveness among their peers, playmates and society at large.

More than that, students are equipped with meaningful learning strategies vital for their future careers. Such strategies as systematic planning, risk taking, problem solving, meaning negotiation and critical assessment of a phenomenon are indubitably imperative for the creation of competent individuals.

Moreover, early acquaintance with learning philosophy that fosters diversity and difference is important in early childhood education. In fact, early childhood years are a critical period where children are experiencing the growth and development of cognition, language, social, emotional and physical competence.

As these developments take place in a context where society is undergoing constant changes in politics and economics and where stereotypes and prejudices against races, religions and ethnicities prevail, what children are experiencing through both formal and informal education can significantly impact on their understanding of the reality they are facing in real life.

Despite its merits, the IB suffers from several shortcomings. First, universalism, the basic tenet that the IB promotes, is an elusive concept - a notion that is deceptively easy to define in a precise way.

To what extent can such traits as love, caring, compassion and responsibility, for example, be universally imparted in individual students who hail from different cultural backgrounds?

Aren't these traits shaped by the community where the students live? As such, they are culture-specific rather than universal, and are bound by the conventions of the community. Second, one can impugn the effectiveness of the inculcation of the so-called universal norms and values and the notion of inclusiveness.

In certain cultures, students are exhorted to take pride in and preserve their own cultural values and identities, and to refrain from assimilating into other cultures not belonging to theirs.

Third, although the IB claims that it teaches universal values to the students, it is not particularly clear to what extent it caters to the needs (i.e. linguistic and cultural) of the students. There is therefore a tacit assumption that the IB is operating under the disguise of inclusiveness and equality, while at the same time it is promoting the inequality and exclusiveness of certain cultures.

Forth, the teaching of critical thinking, one of the selling points in the IB, is not without problems. Scholars in the field of critical practice see the teaching of critical thinking as an imperialistic endeavor, arguing that humans (whatever their cultures are) are capable of developing critical insights without being taught how to think critically through their engagements in the conflicts and contradictions in their life.

Finally, as an imported Western product, the unveiling of the IB in many international schools here is by no means free from capitalistic purposes.

Also as a form of neoliberal movement that permeates worldwide, the IB could become what Bronwyn Davies (2006) , a professor of education at the University of Western Sydney, calls a neoliberal nightmare where ". ordinary people become useful as consumers and as commodities to be manipulated and disposed of when it suits the market".

It would be congenial for the IB operating in local contexts here provided that it embraces local wisdom, in which the teaching and learning activity is situated. Situating the so-called universal values to the students' cultures is pedagogically motivating as it helps students develop critical insights into how they can challenge the dominant culture to which they are compelled to adhere.

Thus, the underlying philosophy of the IB should go beyond the teaching of critical thinking and the promotion of universal values alluded to above.

Rather than prescribing students to think critically, the IB should instead assist them in unearthing and developing their critical insights by, for instance, opposing and resisting ideas, values, norms that are deliberately implanted in them at the expense of their cultural identities.

This is not only viable, but also pedagogically liberating for both students and teachers.