The conversation began almost before students took their seats, and swung freely between Dewey's theories about progressive education and the students' own experiences at Exeter. Some argued that the very table at which they sat embodied Dewey's ideals; others asked whether Harkness learning fosters collaboration or competition. If no single "right" answer emerged, students left the class with a range of perspectives that deepened their understanding of the question.

All in all, a pretty typical day at the Harkness table, right? Right, except that the students seated at that table were, in fact, Exeter faculty members, gathered together as part of the Academy's comprehensive Curriculum Review project. Making students out of teachers is one of the central ideas behind the Curriculum Review, a campus-wide Harkness discussion about how best to educate Exeter students today and in years to come.

This enormous undertaking, now in its second full year-the process will conclude in the spring of 2004-is far from a simple reconsideration of the academic requirements that dictate how many units of history students ought to have under their belts before they graduate. More an examination of the entire Exeter way of life, the Curriculum Review project is a comprehensive study investigating the many facets of learning in general, and learning at Exeter in particular-from what other secondary schools teach, to how the brain works, to the historical roots of the structure of schools today.

"One of the first things that the committee that designed the review process did was to go to the faculty as a whole to clarify what we meant by the word curriculum and what we meant by a review of that curriculum," explains Director of Studies Steve Kushner, who, together with English instructor Ellen Wolff, the chair of the Curriculum Review Committee, is charged with overseeing the process. "As a result, we found that the majority of the faculty defined curriculum very broadly." In the end, the committee adopted a definition of curriculum as "all of the experiences students have under the guidance of teachers"-which, at a boarding school, is necessarily just about everything.

But even those experiences students have independently are spending time under the review's microscope. How a student does in English class depends on many things-how much sleep the student got the night before, what life is like in the dorm-and rather than ignore such factors, the review is trying to identify and address them.

Like a grad student painstakingly researching a doctoral thesis, the Exeter faculty is amassing information from a huge array of sources-faculty study groups, student book groups, lectures and discussion groups led by various experts, journals kept by students about their classes, writing done by faculty members throughout the review process and, yes, days spent shadowing students-all of which will eventually inform decisions about the new curriculum.