MISSION VIEJO : Student Debaters Take on the World

It is probably not every day that a local schoolboy goes one-on-one with Fidel Castro.

Yet Seth Gorman and his fellow students at Mission Viejo High School’s Model United Nations class regularly challenge international leaders like Castro in debate--and sometimes win.

For some in the program, the best part is dressing up as people such as Castro.

“People really enjoy role-playing,” said the Mission Viejo senior. “We try to keep them under control.”

Drawn from Mission Viejo high’s honors program, Model United Nations students tackle the same problems that heads of state struggle over, from terrorism to disarmament, said adviser Laurie Kund.

“It’s about the most exciting thing a kid can do,” she said, “and it’s the best program around for training kids for a university.”

Each student adopts a nation, then spends hours studying it and the surrounding region, Kund said. Copying the United Nations, the students break into delegations, debate the issues and in the process, develop a world view of events.

“I represented the Central African Republic once,” Gorman said. “You can learn a lot from taking the side of a small country. They can learn from us, the United States, by learning how to use our modern technology. From them, we can learn that no problem is too large to be overcome.”

With 120 students, the Mission Viejo program is the fourth largest among the nation’s high schools, Kund said. It will send representatives to a Model United Nations conference at Stanford University in November. The students will also take their debating skills across the country later this school year to a program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

Students can enter the program as freshmen and stay throughout their high school careers, which, Kund said, is her favorite part of being the group’s adviser.

“I get to see them come in as scared freshmen and watch them grow up to be mature, confident young people,” she said. “That’s also very exciting.”