And they are learning about peace by learning about education.
Through all that, they are beginning to understand the way the world goes round.
Mortenson, author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” is the mastermind behind the building of schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Ask Dungan and McAllister's first-, second- and fourth-grade students and they will tell you that Mortenson, after a failed climb of the world's second highest peak, K2, wandered beaten and broken into a small village, where he was nursed back to health.
To repay the kindness, Mortenson promised to build the villagers a school. That was 15 years ago. Working with locals, he's now built about 75 schools.
Part of what funds Mortenson's program is a school-based campaign called Pennies for Peace, which does exactly what the name says.
If you're thinking, “Hey, shouldn't it be Pennies for Schools?” you perhaps don't understand what Mortenson is up to.
Sure, schools educate children and those children stand to have more opportunity than their parents. But Mortenson understands how the zealotry of groups like the Taliban works. They recruit the poor and illiterate.
Work on those problems and peace becomes more likely.
“Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country,” Mortenson told the New York Times earlier this year.
Or, as Kevin Thomas put it Friday at Lewis and Clark: “If you don't have schools, you won't have much else.”
Dungan and McAllister have previously worked the peace angle with their students, but Mortenson's school-building is a way to make the lesson concrete.
“The students can really understand what's being done with this money they're raising,” said McAllister.
The students raised about $2,600 last year, but McAllister and Dungan set their sights considerably higher this year. They've now involved schools all over the five-valley region in an effort to raise $50,000.
That's enough money to build and fund a school in central Asia for three years.
“The kids really want to raise enough money to say they helped build an entire school,” McAllister said.
School kids, by hitting up parents and pitching in their own spare change, have already raised $4,000, and they'll raise more through an art fair they're planning in the spring.
But they also want to take their fundraising effort citywide with a program they're calling “Pots for Peace.”
So they're asking Missoulians to help them on two fronts. First, they'd love to have Missoula's artists produce small, table-sized ceramic pots suitable for collecting change.
And second, they're hoping Missoula businesses will be willing to hosts those pots through the winter and spring.
Then in May, the money will be totaled and sent to Mortenson's Central Asia Institute.
That's the math part of the lesson. Bit by bit, the money adds up. When you've got enough of it, you get a school. When you have enough schools, you get peace.
School kids understand that, even when the world sometimes doesn't.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
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