HUNTINGTON BEACH : Model U.N. Teaches Skills and Issues

The Persian Gulf crisis. The evolving economies of Eastern European nations. The Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. The many faces of South African violence. The current status of women worldwide.

These are some of the many far-reaching issues that an estimated 800 Orange County high school students have confronted in recent months.

As participants in the Model United Nations program, the students address many of the contemporary international problems facing the real United Nations Assembly, using a similar process of research, debate, compromise and resolution.

The program dates back to the early years of the League of Nations and involves students from all over the world. In the United States, more than 50,000 students from hundreds of high schools now participate in mock U.N. conferences held throughout the country each year.

In Orange County, the program is based at the Main Street branch library in downtown Huntington Beach.

The relatively tiny, 39-year-old library, although limited in many of its resources, contains the county’s most extensive collection of United Nations-related materials. A large room devoted to the Model United Nations program includes about 700 books and 60 magazine titles focusing on international relations and policy, in addition to 30 file cabinets brimming with an estimated 10,000 U.N. documents.

The depository was established five years ago and is funded by booster clubs from Edison, Huntington Beach and Ocean View high schools, the county’s three original Model United Nations participants.

Today, 10 schools in the county are involved in the program. Students use the library’s U.N. center as their chief source of information in preparing for about a dozen conferences each school year.

Most of the conferences, similar to mock trials, are held at local high schools or colleges. But each year, some of the schools send delegations to events at Harvard and Georgetown universities, as well as UC Berkeley and Stanford. Edison High School this year plans to send a group to an international conference in the Netherlands.

For each conference, the host campus invites dozens or hundreds of other schools. Each participating school is assigned to represent one or several countries, along with an agenda of topics to be addressed at the conference.

Each school selects three to 20 students to serve on a representative delegation. Those groups are often divided into committees, modeled after existing U. N. panels.

After students research their assigned nations and subjects, resolutions are drafted for the conference. Each delegation, while attempting to support its country’s policy, dissects and debates the issues throughout the conference until an amended resolution is drawn up that can attract supporting votes from a majority of the participants.

Although the program mirrors the United Nations process, “the most important part of this for the students is skill development,” said Alan Armstrong, who founded Ocean View High School’s Model United Nations program 15 years ago and now heads Century High School’s program.

“That’s what we’re really after, rather than preaching the gospel of the U.N.”

In the program, Armstrong says, students learn and enhance their abilities to research, write, think critically, and communicate in both small and large groups.

“Many times, I’ve had kids, after they graduate, come back and say they had lots of fun traveling and meeting new people, but they didn’t really appreciate what they learned from the program until they got into college,” he said.