MONTEZUMA, N.M. -- I’ve noticed that some of my friends with the highest commitment to international peacebuilding, and the most talent to bring to that challenge, have something profound in common: they attended a United World College for their last two years of high school.
So when I got the honor of being invited to do the Commencement Speech at the UWC in Montezuma, New Mexico (about an hour north of Santa Fe), I jumped at the chance to see one of the institutions up close.
I arrived in time for Blue Moon, the student performance event the night before Commencement. The President of the UWC, Linda Darling, sat next to me and told me the nationalities represented on stage during the various acts. The hammed-up performance of Thriller included students from well over a dozen countries. A Romanian girl and a boy from Hong Kong sang a Chinese pop song, accompanied by a Malaysian student on the piano. “How does the Romanian girl know how to sing in Chinese?” I asked President Darling. She just shrugged. Par for the course at this school.
(My favorite international moment of the evening occurred during the Bollywood dance, performed by young women from Nepal, Canada and Norway, all dressed in gorgeous Indian outfits. Just after the closing note of the song, a young man in the audience, in a fit of cross-cultural inspiration, audibly whispered, “Opa”.)
There are about eighty-five countries represented at the school of two hundred students, with 25% of the student body coming from the United States. It is one of a network of twelve UWC’s around the world (the thirteenth is set to open in Maastricht, the Netherlands next year), which graduate a total of 1500 students every year from over 120 countries. They are the most important product of the UWC mission statement, which reads: “UWC makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.”
Service-learning, conflict resolution and environmental sustainability are a part of the curriculum at all the schools, but each one also has a unique focus. The school in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina has the explicit aim of counteracting the legacy of interethnic violence in the Balkans and contributing to the reconstruction of a post-conflict society. The school on Vancouver Island in Canada has a particular emphasis on environmental sustainability, and has assumed stewardship of the Race Rocks Marine Protected Area, giving students both access to and responsibility for the sea lions, killer whales and harbour seals there.
Tom Dickerson, the new Chairman of the Board at the New Mexico school, attended the first UWC, which opened in Wales in 1962. It was the brainchild of German education philosopher Kurt Hahn, who also founded the Outward Bound movement. Growing up in Europe as an Army brat, Dickerson’s grades started falling during his teenage years when he discovered girls. His father read a piece about the UWC in a military publication, and packed his young Romeo off to Wales in the hopes that the challenging curriculum and international exposure would teach him some discipline. The school was in its early, experimental years, Dickerson told me with a hint of wistfulness in his voice, and the student body was a motley crew of misfits like him. He loved every minute of it.
In my brief time in Montezuma, I got the sense that the UWC’s have managed to grow up without losing their sense of the experimental. The Presidents of the International Board of Directors include Nelson Mandela (Honorary) and Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan. The student body is second to none. Imagine the type of teenager who applies to go to school halfway across the globe, choosing to leave their known world at the fragile age of 16, and get thrown together with 200 strangers from everywhere imaginable. Then consider that fewer than 10% get accepted, and you have a window into the profile of the student body at these schools.
Outside of the family, the school is probably the most important influence in a young person’s life. That is precisely why extremists of all varieties do their best to take over schools, from the Nazis to the Hindu nationalist RSS in India to the Taliban in Afghanistan (‘talib’ means student, and Taliban refers to the graduates of a set of schools which teach an extreme variety of Islam). Those institutions get a lot of ink.
But descriptions of what is wrong with the world do not ultimately change the world. Only institutions that hold up the possibility of a new world, and nurture its architects, can accomplish that.
It was my distinct privilege to spend a few short hours inside one such school.
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