It is unlikely, however, that your professors in college will appreciate your sitting in the front row and asking questions without raising your hand. But away from formal classes you can start the germ of Harkness growing wherever there are good people interested in exploring ideas and learning from each other. Start slowly the full-blown Harkness warrior is a pretty terrifying sight to the uninitiated but Harkness will grow if you tend and care for it. One of the greatest lessons that you will carry with you from this Academy is not what you have learned but how you have learned to learn. Good learners can be independent of their teachers, and the greatest teachers work to make their students independent learners.
Great teaching is important to the world.
I hope that many members of the class of 1999 become great teachers. But the greatest teachers are those who make themselves unnecessary as soon as their students are ready to learn on their own. The same might be said of your faculty at Phillips Exeter. Our task has been to give you roots in the academic tradition we represent and the best insight we have gained from our own extended labors in our disciplines. At the same time, we seek to give you wings to exceed our accomplishments and to find joy in adding to the total of human kind s knowledge and art.