[Note: This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on understanding and reforming education.]

When I taught high school English in Buffalo a half-century ago, my friend, Tom, taught Spanish.

He told the kids he would give them the Spanish translation for any words they wanted to know.

Of course, several came after school and asked for translations — for curse words and sexual words! He told them!

What if all schooling was like that? In other words, it was based on what the kids want to know, the questions they have.

This would not be schooling oriented to what the teachers want to say, to subjects, as school is now. Not that we would get rid of subjects, but they would be secondary, not primary.

Isn’t it odd that what kids want to know most — about their bodies, about relationships with other kids, about sex — schools hardly teach them! We don’t even have normal words for some of these things — just “dirty words”!

I have a friend, a male, who taught high school a number of years ago. Kids were required to get a certain number of credits to pass, and they could do extra work to get them.

He wrote a one-credit paper on how girls could tell when things happened in the menstrual cycle. It was a very popular paper. He got feedback that even some girls’ mothers were learning from the paper!

Yet many of us still know that sex is dirty and shouldn’t be taught in schools!

Around the time Tom was teaching kids dirty words in Spanish, I was fortunate enough to read a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

It was one of those great books that said everything you wanted to say, but you just didn’t know yet that you wanted to say it! It suggested that a school’s job was to give kids built-in “crap detectors.”

Another thing it said was that a teacher should never ask a question he or she knew the answer to. That would blow the act of 95% of teaching!

I suppose what it meant was that school should be a place where teachers and students alike would ask, research and discuss what they truly wanted to know about.

Inspired, I told my English class students: “From now on, I am not going to tell you what to learn; you tell me what you want to learn.”

One student summed up the problem succinctly: “For 11 years you have been telling us what to learn and now you want us to tell you what we want to learn. We don’t know what we want to learn!”

Unfortunately, and fortunately, that was my last year of teaching in high school. The thing that I was most proud of was to have students write “personal opinion” compositions.

I didn’t “correct” them unless they wanted me to. I just wrote back my opinion about their opinion. It was a good, but tedious, way to have a conversation.

Overall, however, I quit teaching after that year because I felt that I was boring them, and they were boring me!

But I am still passionately interested in learning. For centuries, school has been “subject-based.” Students learn what other people have learned in the past.

It isn’t based on how and why those who discovered that information came to discover it: They asked questions that were important to them! Why don’t we do the same?

An individual teacher can make a start. Have your class read this article. Ask them to write out what thoughts it triggers in them. Listen to what they say.

Maybe one day a month have the students write down a question about life that they sincerely want to know about. After collecting the questions, read some out loud and ask students to vote on which they would like to discuss. What if students wanted to find out about politics or religion, not to mention sex? Talk about it! But have each write about their own opinion first.

You would never be stuck for answers. Everybody has a cell phone. You can Google anything! Have students summarize and share different sources. Discuss which source they agree or disagree with and why.

Discuss how to know you can trust a source. Since religious or political discussions can be so divisive, ask students to develop a set of rules to use in discussions or debates, to make them civil and useful. (Maybe they could then teach adults how to do this!)

How do we make the transition into having kids become “self-learners”? How could we reform the entire school system? I don’t know. Ask the students.

When my son was in the first grade, a friend of his was at our house. He asked my wife, “Mrs. Sanitate, which is more important, fact or opinion?” Imagine that — 6 years old! Don’t undersell kids!

Teachers, in whatever class you teach, have one day a week or month or year to discuss and discover what kids want to know. Ask them how to reform education.

Should students be allowed to ask questions in school? After second grade, it’s the main thing they should be doing!