This is just an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now, and it felt time to put words to page.

Imagine this high school:

Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc… such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.

And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a "share out" where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media.

So, let’s not go any further than that for a moment – wouldn’t that be a better high school experience than many of the schools across the country? Wouldn’t it be an amazing way to encourage life-long learning, inquiry-based learning, research, collaboration and presentation if kids did something like this every day?

But what about math? What about literature? How would kids learn

Good questions. And maybe kids wouldn’t all learn the same set of skills. But I’m guessing most kids would find the reasons they needed to learn certain math skills. I’m thinking that a subset of kids would wait every week for the Science Times and spend much of the time in the week in between designing experiences, researching all manner of questions and doing all kinds of science learning based on the questions that were raised. And I’m thinking that a bunch of kids would live and die with the Times Review of Books for new books to read. And if reading about the debt crisis this past week doesn’t give you a reason to want to really understand statistics and budgeting and, well, math, then what will?

But what about the material they don’t learn?

Well, if we believe that high school is about helping students to become fully realized citizens, and reading the New York Times every day for four years doesn’t give you reason to want to learn something, does that start to raise the question of whether or not it is important to learn?

I’d love to think that teachers would jump at the chance to spend their time analyzing the kinds of questions kids were asking, and trying to help guide them to what they were searching for. I’d imagine that, for many teachers, that would invigorate them to be engaged in true inquiry-based learning.

I’m sure there are 1,000 reasons not to start this school… 1,000 reasons this might not work.

But isn’t interesting to, instead, wonder if it could?