animal from another and of forgetting how the knownnspecies interact among themselves and with their environments.”nThis is because subjects fall out of the curriculum,nor are taught piecemeal by people on the periphery of thenuniversity. He says, for example, “Classifications of HighernPlants,” “Marine Invertebrates,” “Ornithology,” “Mammalogy,”n”Cryptogams” (ferns and mosses), “Biogeography,”n”Comparative Physiology” — “you may find some ofnthem in the catalogue, but too often with the notationnalongside, ‘not offered.'” Ehrenfeld explains: “The featuresnthat distinguish lizards from snakes from crocodilians fromnturtles . . . aren’t any less accepted or valid than they werentwenty-five years ago, nor are they easier than they used tonbe to learn on your own from books without hands-onnlaboratory instruction.” But people do not work in thosenfields.nEhrenfeld further explains why the question is an urgentnone. “One morning last April, at eight o’clock, my phonenrang. It was a former student of mine who is now a researchnendocrinologist at a major teaching hospital in Houston. Shenhad an odd question: at what point in animal evolution wasnthe hemoglobin molecule first adopted for use specifically asnan oxygen carrier? It was an essential piece of informationnfor medical research she was planning.” The informationnthe student wanted was in an elementary “introduction toncomparative biochemistry.” When Ehrenfeld asked colleaguesnwho was working on this sort of thing, he foundnout—nobody. The graduate students had never even heardnof the field of comparative biochemistry.nNow here we have a very concrete case of the loss ofnknowledge once possessed. Ehrenfeld comments: “notnoutdated, not superseded, not scientifically or politicallyncontroversial, not even merely frivolous: a whole continentnof important human knowledge gone.” It was not dead, butnit lived only in books, which no one read or understood orncould use in the quest for knowledge. Ehrenfeld draws fromnthis story conclusions that need not detain us. In his view thenloss of comparative biochemistry is because of the flow ofnfunds into the wrong hands, into the hands of people whonare not “capable of transmitting our assembled knowledgenof the natural world to the next generation.” So, he says, “Infear for conservation when there is no one left in our placesnof learning who can tell one moth from another, no onenwho knows the habits of hornbills, no one to puzzle over thendiversity of hawthorns.”nIf we now take the case as exemplary, we may asknourselves where, in society, do we assign the task of holdingnon to what we know and making sure the next generationngains access to that? The stakes are too high for the answersnto invoke the episodic and the anecdotal: “here am I, sendnme.” The accident of individuals finds its match in thenuncertainty of books; putting whatever is worth knowingninto books, encyclopedias for example, will not serve, sincenmere information does not inform, and facts withoutnexplanation of what they mean and how they fit together donnot bear meaning or serve a purpose. In age succeeding age,nin some few places, the mind of humanity in the past isnrecreated, not preserved inert but actively replicated, reenactednas a model for the mind of humanity to come. I speak,nof course, of schools as those few places, of teachers as thenactors of knowledge in intellectually replicable form. For ton20/CHRONICLESnnnpreserve what we know we must repeat the processes ofndiscovery, since the only real mode of learning is throughndiscovery, which permits us not merely to know things, butnto understand things. All the facts in the world about mothsnand hornbills and hawthorns, left uninterpreted, will notnyield comparative biochemistry.nAs it happens, I have spent my life working on andocument that was composed so as to present, within anfew volumes, the life and structure, the way of life and worldnview and social theory, of an entire world of humanity: thenJewish people. A few remarkable intellectuals undertook tonwrite a book that would serve as not a mere source ofninformation but as a handbook of civilization: how to formnsociety, what society had to know to do its work, all of usefulnknowledge so formed as to yield meaning and order andncoherence, the deep structure of a social being. To write anbook to do that, they worked out not an encyclopedia ofninformation but a guidebook for a journey of mind, ofnintellect: this is how to think, this is what to think, this is whynto think. They made certain, therefore, that what they knewnwould be known by coming generations, not because theninstitutions would endure, nor because the politics wouldnaccord to their doctrines priority of place. Indeed, the writersnof this document would have found surprising ProfessornEhrenfeld’s certainty that problems are to be solved bynputting money in the right hands, or keeping it out of thenwrong ones.nThey did two things. First, they wrote a book that couldnbe sung. Second, they wrote notes to the music, so thatnanyone could sing the song. They did not spell outneverything; rather, they gave signals of how, if you wanted tonspell things out, you could do so on your own: don’t ask,ndiscover. So they opened the doors of learning to makenroom for all to come, learning serving then as an active verb,nwith discovery its synonym. These notes — signals of how anmoving argument would be reconstructed, how reasonnmight be recapitulated — were few, not the eight notes ofnour octave, but not an infinite repertoire of replicable soundsneither. In any case the medium — notes to the music — isnonly secondary. Their primary insight into how civilizationnas they proposed to frame it should be shaped lay in anothernmatter altogether. It had to do with their insistence upon thenurgency of clear and vigorous and rigorous thought, thenpriority of purpose to argument, the demand for ultimatenseriousness about things to be critically examined. Throughnpractical reasoning and applied logic, they formed the chainsnto link mind to mind, past to future, through a process thatnanyone could enter—and no one, once in, would leave.nI said they wrote a book that could be sung. I mean thatnboth literally, in that their writing was a document meant tonbe said out loud, not read silently; and in that it was meant tonbe studied in community through debate, not meditatednupon privately and personally; writing that was, in the oldnand classic sense, political — public, shared, subject toncoercion, if in the form of reason rather than naked power tonbe sure. But I mean that in another sense as well. JamesnBaldwin said in a short story that every song begins to cry.nSo when I say they wrote a book that could be sung, I meannto invoke a metaphor of a piece of writing that begins notnwith the words and the music, but in the guts, a piece ofn