Community Engagement

I saw this quote on one of my "green" blogs today (and they got it via a planetarium), but I think it's just perfect for museums.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
-Antoine St. Exupery

I think it's important for us in the historical community to keep this always in mind.  We all think what we do is important - the work of collecting, preserving, and interpreting history.  But unless the public cares about what we do, "the work" is dead in the water.  

We throw around action words like engaging, dynamic, interactive, etc. but sometimes I feel that we're really just preserving the history for another generation, not this one. How can we fix that? How can we actively instill our equivalent of a longing for "the endless immensity of the sea" in the communities we serve?