“Marymount celebrates diversity and draws upon it to foster cultural sensitivity, religious understanding, and a global perspective.”
- Marymount Mission Statement
The second of the Goals and Criteria of the RSHM network of schools is “To create unity through diversity.” This is one of Marymount’s most important aims as an educational institution. Children growing up in today’s world are members of a global society: our neighbors are not only those living on our street, or in our town, or in our state, but in countries all over the world, accessible at any time by phone, television, and the internet. Every day our students encounter individuals with different beliefs and appearances. It is Marymount’s goal that our students understand themselves as global citizens who view all these people as fellow human beings, whose differences are enriching rather than alienating, to be appreciated rather than ignored, categorized, or rejected.
Marymount expects its students to embrace diversity by celebrating differences and addressing unconscious biases. The School’s diversity initiatives throughout the year encourage reflection on issues of difference and diversity. The students themselves take the lead in exploring issues of diversity by participating in the Upper School club CAMBIAS—Cultural Awareness Moves Beyond Ignorance And Stereotypes—by attending the annual NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), and by organizing many other activities and events, such as Bias Awareness Day and Harambee, that celebrate diversity.
Marymount’s own community is a diverse one, reflecting in small scale the immense diversities of our global society. We challenge all forms of discrimination based on major social identifiers such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, socio-economic status, physical abilitity, learning differences, sexual orientation, age, and religion. Our curriculum and activities encourage everyone in the community to learn about the principles of solidarity and how to become allies of those groups who have been silenced because of discrimination, bias, and violence. One of the most important lessons of a Marymount education is that we are a unified, powerful, and nurturing community not in spite of our differences, but because of them.