Great visionaries and World leaders have time and again, raised their voice for the urgent need of a World Government. Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi said, "The future peace, security and ordered progress of the world demands a World Federation of free (sovereign) nations and on no other basis can the problems of the modern world be solved."
It was the need of the hour to set up such global organizations which would lay down universally applicable and legally binding laws for all nations and enforce them to bring about peace and order in the world. The present day global problems like world wide terrorism, climate change, cyber-crimes, environmental pollution, threat of 3rd World War and nuclear holocaust, manufacture of deadly nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons, spread of life-threatening diseases, natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and famine, poverty, starvation and illiteracy, call for a concerted effort among all the nations to pool their resources and work together to make the earth a happier place for all human beings.
Such a system would be possible only under a World Government and a World Parliament which has representatives of all countries of the world and think so the we lf are of all humanity. I am firmly convinced that the time has come, friends, to forma World Parliament, a World Government and a World Court of Justice. Let us join our hands to fulfil this dream as the great leader and Nobel Prize winner, Nelson Mandela has said, "Vision without action is just a dream, action without vision just passes the time, and vision with action can change the world."
W.B. Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." You cannot teach a child just by supplying him with information, you also have to cultivate his mind to receive that information and use it in the best possible way. Atom bombs and medicine both need knowledge to make them, but, while one is meant to kill and destroy, the other is meant to heal wounds. Knowledge must be coupled with wisdom and tempered with morality in order to be of use to human beings.
Children of today are wiser than the sages of the past. They are aware that a wrong action on their part can have serious repercussions in the family and in society. Teachers need to use the power of love, persuasion and encouragement to mould their minds to become saviours of humanity, leaders of mankind and builders of a new tomorrow. They have to be patient and persevering with children, constantly guiding their efforts and leading them towards light and learning but never once stepping on their shoes to suppress their creativity and their natural thinking and expression.
CMS has striven to make its education more relevant by choosing pedagogical approaches and technologies that develop the skills needed today. We have also expanded our child well being, virtues-orientation and youth empowerment work to develop pupils' socio-emotional skills. The past year of Covid-induced online education has focused our attention on the role of technology and how is it changing the world. During the pandemic, we at CMS made optimum use of technology to ensure that the education of students did not suffer due to school closure. We switched to online learning using Google Classrooms and Zoom meetings through which teachers took live classes in every subject.
We created opportunities for our students to grow in confidence and develop skills through our diverse programme of sport, music, literary activities, art-craft, debates, public speaking, educational trips, youth empowerment activities, school council processes, community service, environmental activities, hobby clubs and international exchanges. Through these students learnt to fail and succeed and gained perspective and self-knowledge. We are especially proud that, belying our large size, we created space and opportunity for the flourishing of the talents and niche interests of individual children. And, even when it did not get translated into visible achievement, we valued effort, participation (in a broad range of activities), and, importantly, also one another.
I am absolutely thrilled with the developments of the past year, and am proud of the diligent and dutiful CMS staff who remain in a posture of learning, and are constantly accepting new challenges in order to help students to shore up the many spectacular victories described above. I am grateful to our discerning parent community for recognizing the specialness of CMS education, for entrusting us with their children and for supporting the home-school partnership.
CMS is proud to be a pioneer in school education, staying ahead of rapidly evolving pedagogical practices and remaining a trendsetter in this digital, globalised age. We recognize the need to continuously adapt in order to prepare our students for an uncertain future, to empower our teachers using modern best practices, and to keep our organisation's systems and processes running smoothly and efficiently.
CMS classrooms are now truly digital, with teachers comfortably and naturally incorporating online content into their teaching plans, and even creating and sharing quality content of their own. Pilot projects in eLearning have started to attain maturity, with detailed impact evaluation studies of a number of artificially-intelligent Maths, English, and Science learning programmes in progress and curriculum-integrated Maths eLearning is ready to be rolled out across all CMS schools in the coming academic year.
Behind the scenes of CMS education, technology continues to be used to drive major operational efficiencies. Having migrated processes such as procurement and workforce management to the CMS IT Portal, the resulting data is being used to inform strategic decision-making as well as the development of systematic decentralisation and accountability.
City Montessori School, CSI endeavours to facilitate the creation and sharing of new ideas to meet the aspirational needs of the new generation. More than ever, in the face of unprecedented changes taking place in the world, education must be visionary and future oriented and should provide learners with skills they need to succeed in this fast changing world.
At CMS, we believe in shaping young impressionable minds growing with unprecedented amount of information at their fingertips is one of life's biggest challenges. We strive to empower our students to grow as individuals with strong, open, discerning minds with an international perspective, preparing them to make their mark in the global village– the world that has come to be today.
CSI helps in the maintenance of academic standards at CMS and to keep the curriculum future – oriented in face of the unprecedented changes taking place in the world, ensuring that the learners get the relevant skills they need to succeed in this challenging world.