For most of the history of schooling, the scarce resource was information. A teacher knew things; a library held things; a student's job was to move what was in one into the other. Almost everything about how schools are organised — the timetable, the syllabus, the examination — is a solution to that scarcity.

That scarcity is gone. A fourteen-year-old with a phone has faster access to more accurate information than any faculty room in the world. What has not changed is the harder part: knowing which question is worth asking, recognising when an answer is thin, and having the appetite to keep going when the first three attempts fail.

So we teach question-forming explicitly. In Middle School, students spend the first week of every unit generating questions before they are given any content at all — and then sorting them: which of these can be answered by looking something up, which need an experiment, which are the kind that a whole field is still arguing about.

The sorting is the lesson. A student who can tell the difference between a lookup question and a research question has learned something that will outlast every fact in the unit.

It also changes what a classroom sounds like. A room where the teacher asks all the questions is a room where the students are waiting. A room where students have written the questions on the board themselves is a room where they are already working.

None of this softens the academic demand. Our examination results matter and we prepare for them seriously. But a school that only produces students who are good at answering has prepared them for a world that no longer exists.