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Kenmont Montessori School in Brownsville celebrated United Nations Day on Thursday with a festival of world cultures honoring the school’s namesake Maria Montessori and her vision of world peace.
United Nations Day commemorates the creation of the United Nations on Oct. 24, 1945 when a majority of signatories signed the UN Charter including the five permanent members of the Security Council.
Kenmont celebrates the anniversary each year with a morning program honoring cultures around the world and a pot-luck dinner featuring each country’s cuisine in classrooms decorated to represent diverse cultures.
“This year our theme is ‘All You Need is Love,’ and so we’ve been getting ready. Our students have been doing country studies … they’ve been learning about the country, understanding who they are and today we culminate with a beautiful show in the morning,” Kenmont Principal Julie Gonzalez said.
“Our show will begin with our UN Montessori delegates. These are the 7th and 8th grade students. They will be representing us in February in the United Nations conference in New York City and then we will be heading in May to Rome for another Maria Montessori UN conference. We’ll be representing Kenmont there. In New York we will be going as a delegation of India, and in Italy we will be going as a delegation of Finland,” Gonzalez said.
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician, educator and innovator, acclaimed for her educational method that builds on the way children learn naturally. She opened the first Montessori school, the Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House, in Rome on Jan. 6, 1907.
In a Kenmont classroom decorated to look like Japan, classmates Andrea Regina Guerrero Cardenas and Francisco Elizondo Garay showed off their kimonos.
“Maria Montessori really believed that peace would come if we educate the child. They are the future of the world. If they begin to learn about peace education at a very young age, they will be our future leaders and they are the future of our world, so this a key peace education at Kenmont, because we believe in it,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez, who also teaches 7th grade algebra, said she recently spoke to her students about the wars going on in the world and “the fact that we were having a normal algebra class and at that exact same moment students in Croatia, students in Israel, students in Palestine, students in South America, they were not being able to have the same conditions of just having a normal, safe school environment.”
“Really, I want them to empathize with that, because we are here we dis-attach from it, and our goal through this event is that they understand other cultures and they empathize with them … honestly, I truly believe that this is our future … they’re going to be our leaders (and I want them) to truly understand and empathize with other people that we’re actually all the same,” she said.
