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Model UN: Training the Leaders of
the Future
In March of last year, the Upper Elementary
and Middle School students from my school traveled to the United Nations
in New York City to participate in the first ever Model UN for students
of their age. They sat on the floor of the UN voting, just as
delegates from countries around the world do, on resolutions they had
written with their fellow delegates during the previous two days in
committee meetings. For the teachers, organizers and UN representatives
who were there to witness the tote board recording those first votes,
it was a moving and profound moment. It signaled the culmination of
not only months of teaching and effort with our students, but a new
chapter in the generational effort to provide children with the tools
they will need to solve the world’s problems through discussion and
agreement instead of through violence and war.
It all started with an email I received
in October, 2006. Judith Cunningham, an editor at M:
The Magazine for Montessori Families, had sent out notices to Montessori
schools in the United States, Canada and Mexico inviting them to participate
in a Montessori Model UN. I was immediately intrigued by the idea
– as a classroom teacher I am always searching for ways to expand
my students’ views of the world and looking for opportunities to give
them experiences that they can take with them into the world as adults.
Judith’s description of the Model UN was a perfect fit with that goal.
I got together with my students to
tackle the first task: what countries would we represent at the
Model UN? The students had many ideas, but we settled on two countries
we thought would be interesting to study and represent because of how
different they are from the United States – the Czech Republic and
Madagascar. As soon as we had chosen our countries, we set to
work researching and learning everything we could about them.
We also began to learn some things
about the United Nations that we did not know. For example, we
learned that the members of most governments only think 12 to 18 months
into the future, due largely to the way they create their budgets.
At the UN, by contrast, delegates and leaders think 30 to 60 years into
the future, trying to make the goals and work that they do now have
a positive influence on the world not just for the people who are currently
alive on our planet, but for their children, and their children’s
children. We also learned that the UN’s commitment to the future
is largely due to their care and attention to children now –
children and health, children and clean water, children and food, children
and war. We got a very different view of the UN and the work it
does as we looked beyond headlines we almost always see in newspapers
in the United States, where the faults of the UN are usually what are
highlighted, rather than the UN’s many successes.
Within a week of choosing their countries
my students were researching in earnest. We knew that we would
be writing position papers about the fresh water situation in both countries,
and about children’s rights, so, after we learned all we could about
each countries government, geography and culture, we set to work to
find out their policies on those specific topics.
We learned that Madagascar, a country
with very close ties to France, is losing much of its forests because
of lumber exports. This stripping of the forest from the land
has lead to widespread erosion, which has fouled the fresh water supply
of the country. Fouled fresh water means less drinking water, an important
and life supporting limited resource on in an island country as small
as Madagascar.
The students began to see through
this research the repercussions of acts committed in a country without
forethought – in Madagascar, people cut and sell lumber for cash,
something they don’t have a lot of but the cutting of the lumber causes
their fresh water supply to diminish, which makes the cutting of the
lumber now seem like not such a good idea. How to solve the problem?
My students worked to come up with other ways for Madagascar to get
the cash they need, and decided on a plan for ecotourism that seemed
to minimally impact the environment.
That is the beauty of the Model UN.
Students work to come up with real world solutions for real world problems.
Model UN delegates from rich nations learn that they must work with
poorer nations as the world continues to be a place of diminishing resources.
Delegates from poorer nations need to work with richer nations to get
the cash they need to sustain themselves. Big countries’ delegates
need to ally themselves with smaller countries to maintain the environmental
health of their regions, smaller countries’ delegates learn that they
need bigger nations for protection and resources.
The children who participate in Model
UN learn that cooperation is the way that nations get along; they learn
that a the leaders of a country always have to think beyond their country’s
borders when making policies; they see first hand that the actions of
one country affects other countries around it, and sometimes the whole
world. My own students, sitting on the floor of the UN, representing
nations they had come to know so well, could not help but see that we
are not so much a bunch of countries all living on the same planet,
but one world, where we have to find a way to live together, because
if we can’t, the alternative, as we have seen in Darfur, Rawanda,
the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East, can be ghastly.
We will be participating in the Model
UN this year again. During the summer, my students emailed to me suggestions
for the countries that they would like to represent. We will work
through the school year to learn about those countries – their successes
and difficulties. We will go to New York in April, we will meet and
work with the delegates of other countries, we will look for solutions
to problems not just for today, but for the future.
We are training the leaders of tomorrow
today so that, 30 to 60 years from now, they will have the tools and
skills they need to make our world a safer, fairer, better, more peaceful
place for all the peoples of all the countries who share it as their
home. Isn’t that what education should be all about?
Posted in December, 2007
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