City Montessori School, Lucknow

The world’s largest single-city private school has taken extra-curricular education to an entirely new plane and in the process has acquired a global reputation for the high-quality academic experience it offers  A citation in Guinness World Records for the largest number of student enrollments in a private school operational in a single city is just one of the many landmark achievements of Lucknow’s City Montessori School (CMS). The school which started off with just five students in 1959, currently has a mind-boggling 29,000 students instructed by 2,000 teachers spread over 21 campuses on its muster rolls. But City Montessori School’s claim to fame is not just its massive enrollment. Over the past four decades since it was promoted, among the many awards that have come its way are the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education (2002), whose citation lauded the school for promoting “the universal values of education for peace and tolerance at a time when these values are increasingly being challenged”; the Friend of Young Physicists Award of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and the first Henry Derozio award instituted by the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations, New Delhi. Moreover incredibly, the school has hosted four international conferences of chief justices of the world to push the case for Article 51 of the Constitution of India which inter alia articulates that “The State shall foster respect for international law”. To this end, concerned about the stockpile of 36,000 nuclear warheads accumulated by seven nations (including India and Pakistan), the school has appointed itself the advocate of the “world’s two billion children and generation yet unborn” to press for the establishment of a World Parliament “with powers to enact enforceable international laws for the entire world”. Undeterred by indifferent official reaction to this initiative, CMS is clearing the decks for the 5th International Conference of Chief Justices of the World scheduled to be held in Lucknow on December 10-12 this year. Founded by Jagdish and Bharti Gandhi, the former who put himself through Lucknow University by doing a variety of jobs that included shoe shining and hawking newspapers and the latter an educationist with a doctorate in the Montessori teaching method from the Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwa Vidyalaya, Varanasi, the school’s motto is Jai Jagat. Gandhi explains how this motto has energised the City Montessori School mission. “Jai Jagat translates into glory be to the world, or hail the world We believe that our schools are institutions in which children essentially learn to interact harmoniously with each other. The three R’s are important but perhaps more important is our emphasis upon children learning social skills and moral values. Godliness and globalism are important tenets for us because there is no point in spreading education that leaves children socially disabled. A school is after all a building with four walls that holds tomorrow within it,” says Gandhi. These objectives are to be achieved through the four building blocks of education devised by the Council for Global Education, a Reykjavik (Iceland) based not-for-profit organisation dedicated…