but not to one another, and professors listen to no one butnthemselves, and writing lots of things down on paper is takennto demonstrate knowledge and understanding. But what ifnteaching is understood in other terms altogether, as engagementnin a shared task of learning and understanding andnexplanation? What if teaching is a form of leading, bynexample — follow me! That is, to be sure, a risk-laden modenof teaching, and it is a way of teaching that fails much morenoften than it succeeds. For it- makes the teacher into thenmodel, the example, rather than the authority, and modelsnor examples are there to be examined and criticized. Thatnmode of teaching makes the classroom into a laboratory innwhich mental experiments are undertaken. Since, in thisnreading of the act of teaching, the professor turns out to benthe guinea pig, my call is for us to play an unattractive role.nBut it is an honest one, and it is one that serves.nFourth and last, if as I claim our task is to echo the naturalnsounds of knowledge that are knowledge, then some soundsnwill resonate, others not. Today we make a cacophony ofnnoise; most of what we teach is mere facts, about this andnthat, and no theory instructs us on what takes precedence,nand why some facts are trivial or merely particular. Entirenareas of learning now turn out to be made up of an endlessnseries of cases, such as the field of ethics. You can studynjournalistic ethics, medical ethics, legal ethics; you can raisenmoney for professorships in all of these subjects, and youncan make yourself into an expert on some area of ethics,nmedical ethics having attracted more than its share of failedncareerists and bright-eyed opportunists. But these entrepre­n22/CHRONICLESnSerum Sub Luitiina Priman{svet cvetova u svetla svece)nby Peter RussellnMove softly, cold moonlight,—nWhy disturb a stone?nBlood ran once in veins,nBright the living zone, —nLife wherever is its own.nOften now the stream runs dry —nPebbles catch crystal beams.nThe torrents rush a stifled sigh.nPast is past and only seems.nWhat were once Enna’s meadows.nMulticolored, dazzling, wide —nNow is but a waste of shadow,nDrooping leaves and buds too late.nFaded colours, petals dyed,nA wodd of flowers by candlelight, —nAnd dying embers in the grate.n— Translated by the author from hisnSerbo-Croatian original.nnnneurs of learning, trained in one thing so doctors ofneverything, make things up as they go along, for whatnsounds right is right; there is no theory of the thing theynstudy, because there is no principled inquiry into thenfoundations of analysis and criticism. Yet we in the Westnhave inherited a tradition of philosophical ethics that comesnto us from the Greeks and a tradition of theological ethicsnthat comes to us from ancient Israel through Christianitynand Judaism; we have those-theeriesT-^hese-pfinciplcs ofndecision-making, that have laid the foundations for coherentnthinking about a cogent subject. When a field can give onlynexamples and cases, its casuistry attests to its intellectualnbankruptcy. But the casuistry serves because philosophy isnnot learned, and, reinventing the wheel, the ethicists in thenhospitals unwittingly teach a dreadful lesson indeed: what itnmeans to lose what you’ve got.nSo yes, humanity can forget what it knows, and the costsnare there to see at Easter Island, or in the shelves of books wenno longer can read but need to read, and in the areas ofnlearning that are true and useful but no longer accessible.nThe task is not new knowledge but the reconsideration ofnknowledge. When we succeed—and we in universities arenthe only ones who can do the work — we shall hold on tonwhat we have received, because we shall have made it ournown. That is what I conceive to be the principal work of anyngeneration: to make what has come to us as a gift intonsomething that is our own, something that we too can use;nin the case of learning, to make learning our own in such anway that we too can learn. n