To get the right answer, we have to ask the right question. Too often, we don’t.

I first saw the importance of asking the right question 28 years ago, when I was on the SAD 9 (Mount Blue) school board. In response to a question about students’ smarts, the superintendent, Dr. Lawson Rutherford, said: “We ask, ‘How smart is this kid?’ when we should be asking, ‘How is this kid smart?'”

With that sentence, Rutherford, who retired in 1993 to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, turned around my thinking about schooling. And a lot of other things.

First step in the turnaround. If we ask how smart a kid is, we automatically put the kid into a ranking of smartest to stupidest. One result of that hierarchy is the tracking system, which makes teaching easier, at least for the most-senior teachers who get to teach the “college” and “college A” kids, because teachers don’t have to concern themselves with bringing along the kids who don’t get it first time every time.

And those teaching the bottom or “general” group, the kids tagged as numb, can work hard at their craft but recognize the odds stacked against success. No one expects those teachers to succeed often, so often they don’t.

But, turn the question around and ask, “How is this kid smart?” and you’re in a whole new ball game. First, it puts the monkey on the backs of the educationists to find each pupil’s best learning style and then to adjust, year to year, month to month and day to day, to that learning style so they can reach and teach every student in their classes.

That is wicked hard work. (Note to editors: I didn’t use the word “very.”)

Some might argue that, at 77, I am ineducable. Not entirely true. I always did OK in a traditional classroom, listening to the teacher and asking questions when I was confused. Or more likely, asking questions when I was willing to admit that I was confused.

I learn well by reading, although I am a slow reader and have difficulty with the density of a lot of academic writing. (That helps explain why I left graduate school without a PhD.) Later in life, I found that I learned quite well by example, but not so well by being told. Show me how to swab the floor, and I can copy you. Tell me how to swab a floor, and I may have to come back and ask questions a time or two before I get it.

Every one of us has a learning style, or styles, and educationists should be asking each student some questions (the right questions) to determine her learning style and then teaching to that style.

To be more current, look at the brouhaha over ranked-choice voting. To be clear, I consider ranked-choice voting among the numbest ideas to come down the pike in a spell.

But no one asked the right questions when petition-passers got the signatures to put the question to voters in 2016. The people pushing for ranked-choice did their job as it was defined. But the Legislature faltered on the issue, and not just after the referendum.

Years ago, is setting rules for legislation by referendum, a method being used more and more in Maine, the Legislature didn’t require anyone to ask the right question, to wit: Is this idea, if it becomes law, constitutional?

Maine has provisions for advisory opinions from the attorney general as to the constitutionality of proposals, so this question could have been sent for attorney general review. If considered potentially unconstitutional in whole or in part, it could been rewritten before the petitions were printed. But no one ever required anyone to ask the question about constitutionality.

Had we asked the right question beforehand, Maine could have been spared the confusion, the backing-and-forthing of what is subject to ranked-choice (apparently, in-state) and what isn’t (apparently, Congress and president). And the further passing of petitions seeking a people’s veto of the legislative veto of the original people’s vote. And now the looming vote in June as to whether to repeal the vote of 2016. You get the picture. Ask the right question in the first place and spare us the sideshow(s).

If these two examples aren’t enough, consider three others, briefly.

Democrats go to great effort to ask whether President Trump is a racist. Dumb question. Of course he is. He wouldn’t be president if he weren’t a racist. The proper question(s) is what are the likely consequences of having a racist president and, more important, what can we do to minimize the damage he does while in office?

Or, Bret Stephens, conservative columnist in the New York Times, this week castigated his fellow conservatives for failing to ask the right question about federal spending, which is: What are our priorities for spending, especially on social programs? Instead, we (in this case congressional Republicans) ask: How can we get the votes to lower taxes without cutting spending? Wrong question, and the answer is another trillion dollars in deficits.

That’s your grandchildren whose pockets are being picked to pay down those deficits.

Back to the SAD 9 school board. Rutherford had presented a candidate for a teaching job. The candidate had the best scores among all applicants, so Rutherford was pretty well obliged to put the name forward. But when a director applauded the nominee for having had 17 years of classroom experience, Rutherford asked a more telling question: “Does this teacher have 17 years experience or one year of experience 17 times?”

The candidate may have been content to rest on the laurels won in the first year of teaching.

Is that the teacher you want in the classroom? Maybe not, if you ask the right question.

Bob Neal hopes he can keep on asking questions for a while longer, especially when he can think up the right questions to ask.

Bob Neal