Today’s school curricula are largely defined by the competencies students are expected to acquire during their studies, and by the content—referred to as “knowledge”—that they are supposed to learn (or at least study). Among these defining elements, the questions to be addressed are rarely included. Even when questions are highly relevant—such as those related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—they are not presented in the form of actual questions.

We could imagine a curriculum in which learning objectives are defined through the questions to be studied, and where groups of students (and individuals) are assessed based on the quality of the responses they provide and how they present and defend them. But since such a curriculum does not yet exist, we must seek out questions that students can genuinely take on as their own—questions that are meaningful enough to justify the effort of finding appropriate answers.

As the Andalusian educator José Manuel Estévez Zaragoza (2003) wrote:
“It makes no sense to give answers to those who have not asked the questions; that is why the teacher’s basic task is to recover the questions, the concerns, the search process of the men and women who developed the knowledge now found in our textbooks. […] To do this, we must abandon our blind faith in the neatly ordered answers of textbooks, turn our students’ gaze back to the world around us, and recover the initial questions, compelling them to think.”