The international conferences and the official publications of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) comprise a platform where a growing number of governments exposed their considerations and concerns with the purpose of building up a better world through education. The resulting recommendations foster the basis of an 'international code for public education'. The voluminous archives of the IBE comprise a particularly fertile source for understanding 'the variants and invariants', and of course also the purposes of school organisations and curricula as promoted by these organisations. The paradoxes of this effort carried out during the first forty years represent both the challenges for its survival and the outline of this article: (a) giving up on all obligations and political statements so as to ensure effective actions at governmental level; (b) documenting local needs so as to establish a world chart; (c) supporting mass schooling through state involvement for promoting individual emancipation; (d) promoting curricula designed on separate subjects so as to guarantee harmonious complete personal growth; (e) advocating scientific objectivity for spreading the methods and principles of New Education; (f) acting upon public schooling, the reserved hunting grounds of nations, for building up international education.