But there was also no doubt that in the community pageant I attended in a small Montana town, the old heads were passing on to the next generation much of what they had found to be the secrets to real success, and that the youved by what they were hearing. Young people want to belong, want to join us, and as teachers make the effort to talk about what community has been, what it is, and what we want it to be, they create precisely the sort of conversation young people can join. The Montana Studies projects that result are not another frill tacked on to our educational mission, but a direct trajectory into the heart of that mission. At the summer institute Art Ortenberg, founder of the Heritage Project, cautioned against allowing the official culture of the various agencies involved in the project to deaden the sense of discovery or to interfere with young people finding for themselves the things of value in their own communities. Of course, those communities are changing, and putting young people in contact with the stories of their communities is not a strategy to stop change.
Young people face a different world than their elders faced, and they are by nature progressive.
But by developing their historical consciousness, we stand a better chance of balancing the best in our progressive and our conservative traditions. To the extent that we are progressive, we keep searching for better ways of living, but to the extent that we are conservative, we measure change against the best of our past to ensure that change is in a good direction. When we examine our past and identify the times that we know we can let go only with loss, we can at the same time identify what it is in them that we really miss, and we can look for chances to recreate these in a modern setting. It was fun, gathering to do the branding. But the important part was not the branding, but the neighborliness, the trading of labor rather than cash, the sharing of work that needed to be done.