On Monday, September 23, Mount Madonna School (MMS) will host a commemoration of the International Day of Peace. Shira Coleman Hagar and Marcia Stein, presenters with Educators for Peaceful Classrooms and Communities (EPCC), will facilitate a discussion with students and faculty about a framework for promoting peace. The commemoration will take place from 10:00-11:30am in the school’s upper campus Assembly Room.
This year’s theme “Cultivating a Culture of Peace,” represents a call to action that recognizes the individual and collective responsibility to foster peace. Peace day is celebrated annually on September 21 as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace.
“Commemorating the International Day of Peace reminds us that peace is the presence of justice, fundamental freedoms and rights, cooperation and respect for life,” commented Mount Madonna Head of School Ann Goewert. “By embracing the theme of cultivating a culture of peace, we commit to nurturing understanding, compassion and collaboration inside and outside of our school community, laying the foundation for a more harmonious world. Actions of peace are powerful and a single act can make a significant and lasting difference.”
All of Mount Madonna’s preschool through grade 12 students will attend the commemoration. The event will include students reading peace poems and personal reflections and MMS elementary students performing the song “This Day of Peace.” The high school choir will perform “I Will Be the Change,” composed by Troy D. Robertson and inspired by the words of Mahatma Gandhi.
Stein and Hagar will address students on the topic of “Peace in Our Community: Diversity and Actionable Justice.”
“My personal journey into cultivating peace came through parenting; the source of my most valued life lessons,” said Hagar, who is a parent of two MMS students. “Parenting taught me to build respectful relationships, honor how we are all the same and we are all different, problem solve in relationship with others, and to hold my values as kind and firm limits.
“EPCC focuses on educating those who work with children,” she continued. “We believe the most powerful way to cultivate peace is for the family and the school to work together to teach and model justice and respect.”
What does that look like?
- Teaching the value of diversity, acknowledging the diversity we have and finding opportunities to experience diversity that we don’t
- Understanding the obstacles to peace our specific community is experiencing
- Recognizing opportunities to become a more just community
- Identifying the resources we have to make transformation
- Taking just action to cultivate peace and right wrongs
The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the day of peace as a period devoted to non-violence and cease-fire.
2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. In that declaration, the UN recognizes that peace “not only is the absence of conflict, but also requires a positive, dynamic participatory process where dialogue is encouraged and conflicts are solved in a spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation.”
“Gandhi said that if we want peace we must educate the children,” said Hagar. “I’m excited to be working with Mount Madonna School to cultivate peace.”
