In Chapter 5 Palmer introduces his concept of 'subject-centered' education. Good teachers "replicate the process of knowing by engaging students in the dynamics of the community of truth." They replicate the process by keeping their teaching communal.

But to teach in a communal way requires that teachers leave both the conventional pedagogy based on the assumption that only the teacher knows the truth and the student-centered pedagogy that assumes that standards of quality will arise from student discussion.

Instead, Palmer suggests that teachers use the subject-centered method in which the subject, the great thing, is at the center of the class' concerns. "Passion for the subject propels that subject, not the teacher, into the center of the learning circle."

The key to working in this method is to open a space in which the students can have a conversation with the subject and with each other. This conversation occurs when the teacher leads the students to find the their discipline's "gestalt, an internal logic, a patterned way of relating to the great things at its core." Palmer asserts that teachers should leave a coverage model and adopt a "microcosm" view. Students focus on key problems in order to learn the internal logic of the discipline, including where information comes from and what it means.

Palmer shows how this method works by reviewing first the case of a medical school dramatically revising its curriculum and then a sociology class coming to terms with basic concepts.