Looking Up from the Problems

by Michael Umphrey

Originally Published in State of the Arts, September, 1998 (c) Michael Umphrey 

When Lewis and Clark traversed the unknown, they met the day's obstacles with ingenuity and vigor, but they also regularly stopped to take their bearings from the planets above, so they didn't get lost amid all their problem-solving.

"We are not here to solve problems," interjected Art Ortenberg, founder of the Montana Heritage Project. "We are here simply to help kids get educated." We were at one of those meetings where current reality tempts people to look down, focusing on whatever mess is at hand.

My years in the classroom confirm that this way of thinking can take us to the heart of what we need to do. Tami was a student who used to drop by my classroom after school to talk about her drinking and her tangled love life. She had all the problems that preoccupy so many schools today: drugs, sex, and poor academic work. She knew I didn't approve of her actions (which is why I think she chose to talk to me about them), but she also knew I wouldn't recite the usual teacher speeches, which she knew as well as I did.

We had been reading The Chosen in class, a novel about the wonder of a life devoted to study. It's a romance about scholarship. The protagonist, Danny, is driven to study and to learn and to understand. One afternoon Tami leaned her chin in her hands and said, "I want to be like Danny."

Though on the surface her life had little in common with Danny's life, I didn't laugh. Real education often isn't happening on the surface, where usual educational measurements focus. To really change our lives, first we need to see that other ways are possible and then we need to desire them.

At the moment, Tami couldn't get free of her bad habits, but education had planted in her the seeds from which freedom grows: vision and desire. Kids who are surrounded by bad things need, with the urgency a drowning person needs a life preserver, visions of ways the world might be that are found in history, literature, and art. The right story can be more useful than a textbook or a computer. The last time I talked with Tami was when she contacted me for a recommendation to law school. She was on the dean's list at the university.

Mr. Ortenberg was clear that his point is not that we cannot or should not solve problems. Rather, it is that if we forget to look up from what seems urgent at the moment, to take our bearings amid large-scale and slow-moving realities, we are likely to wander in the wilderness forever, changing course at each new mountain-range or river canyon. When Lewis and Clark traversed the unknown, they met the day's obstacles with ingenuity and vigor, but they also regularly stopped to take their bearings from the planets above, so they didn't get lost amid all their problem-solving.

The Heritage Project is not yet another program. Rather, it is an act of faith in education, in the ability of communities to meet life's challenges through hard study and improved understanding. We hope to instill in young people (by searching for it ourselves) the sort of historical consciousness that can help them take their bearings amid today's urgencies.

By sending youth into their communities to discover what has changed and what has stayed the same, how current institutions came into being and how they have adjusted to events over time, what obstacles the older generation faced and how they acted and what happened as a result and what advice they now feel prepared by experience to offer, our faith is that the next generation will be able to reach sound conclusions and make wise decisions.

Though we stress using traditional academic skills--reading, researching, analyzing, interviewing, documenting, writing, creating, producing, and performing-to study the past, we trust that by helping young people place the day's events in a larger historical context they will also see, maybe better than we ourselves see, what needs to be done next.

Can we prove it's working?

I believe so. When people say, "This is an important book; it changed my life," what other proof should we want? When students and teachers say, as Phil Leonardi from Corvallis has said, "This is an important Project; it has changed the way I live my life," people of good sense recognize that such testimony has value.

Renee Rasmussen in Chester was considering quitting the Project because of demands on her time. She asked her students whether she should stop doing the school's drama program or stop doing heritage projects. "You can't quit the Heritage Project," a student protested. "That's the thing that changes us, that makes us aware!"

Molly Pasma in Simms worked with a special education student who was on the verge of dropping out of school. He got into trouble for skipping his science class, and it turned out that he had been downtown talking with a group of elders who were welcoming his questions. Though he had no connection with most of his school work, he began crying when he was questioned about this behavior.

"I got you in trouble," he said to Molly. "I have ruined the whole Heritage Project for everybody. They probably won't let us do it any more. But I liked it so much, going down to the coffee shop and talking to those old men about World War II. They brought me old newspapers about the war I could read. It gave me a place to go."

Rose Goyen from Libby talks about the way the project solves the problem of student motivation. "I thought I knew how to teach," she said. "I have been at this a long time. But in Heritage Class the kids say, 'Let's do this,' or 'Let's do that,' and they have lists of things they want to do-lists I didn't make out. The Heritage Project has invigorated my teaching. I look forward to going to that class. It brings a whole new approach and a whole new excitement."

In Roundup, teacher Tim Schaff says that "the Montana Heritage Project changes lives, and it changes lives through connections." He told about a student named Eddie who has been under medication for manic depression. Eddie wanted to interview an old man named Ivan. "Ivan runs an asphalt business. He is 82 years old and still works. He has a reputation for having a nasty temper and for getting a little growly. But Eddie was determined to interview Ivan, even though I told him Ivan might blow up at him.

"Eddie and Dana, another student, went down to see Ivan. He met them at the front door and would not let them in the house. His wife had died the year before and he told them he did not keep the house up like he should, but they could interview him in the shop.

"Ivan began to play a record. It was this beautiful tenor voice. Eddie found out that Ivan sang as a lead singer in the Boston Metropolitan Opera. Eddie was pretty impressed with that. They got to talking and they talked about Ivan's hobbies, about how he had been in an orphanage in Nebraska and about his time in World War II. Ivan was one of three survivors in his unit. It was a very profound thing for Eddie and Dana to be involved in.

"Then Ivan started talking about chess. He was wishing that he had someone to play chess with. Well, Eddie came back to school all excited. I have students do post-interview reports to the class, and I try to limit them to about ten minutes, but Eddie wanted to tell everything. At the end of his report, he said, 'I am going to go back and play chess with Ivan.'

"To this day Eddie goes down once a week and plays chess with Ivan. That's how the Heritage Project creates connections--and how it changed the lives of a lonely old man and a lonely boy."

Genuine solutions tend to solve not just the problem they focus upon but many other problems as well. The first step in most problem-solving recipes is to "define the problem," which sometimes means putting on blinders, taking the problem out of its context and dealing with it in isolation. The "solutions" that follow sometimes merely "export" problems to other places. We chase the bump in the carpet around the room, stomping furiously. Kids are taken out of history and English classes to visit counselors. Time is taken away from important studies to rehearse test-taking skills. One problem is "addressed" by creating a phalanx of new problems.

The Heritage Project encourages people to look up, to gaze toward the horizon where we hope to go, to restore our historic faith in people and in education, and to mobilize our communities around a common purpose-that of passing on to the next generation our understanding of one another and of the world in which we live. A good community is itself a learning expedition, a way of moving forward by discussing problems in the light of all that we've learned so far.

Many of the problems we face-drug abuse, the growth of gangs, teen-age pregnancy, school drop outs-are manifestations of weak communities. But as we make our schools more community-centered, our communities become more education-centered. Both school and town come nearer to realizing their potential, and therein lie many solutions.

Sometimes solutions we weren't even looking for arise. Last year Bigfork passed an operating levy for the school with a margin of fewer than forty votes. One of the community elders who had worked with students during the year sent the superintendent a note: "We voted for the levy, and it was the first time we have voted for a school levy since the 1950's. These kids came to our home and brought us to the school, and now we feel a connection, and we felt strongly about the importance of passing this levy."

The Montana Heritage Project is now beginning its fourth year. Veteran teacher Bob Malyevac from Libby says, "I have been in this from the beginning, but the journey is barely starting."

Teachers in the Heritage Project want to talk with other teachers about how to do this work and why it matters. Schools that would like to schedule inservice programs or workshops should contact the project through the director: Michael Umphrey; P.O. Box 672; St. Ignatius, MT 59865.

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