At age 86, educational theorist E.D. Hirsch is finally being rehabilitated:
“It’s hard to feel like a guru,” he says, quietly. Then he offers a soft chuckle. “I’ve been a pariah for so long.”
It was back in 1987 that “Don” Hirsch, then English department head at the University of Virginia, published his first popular work, Cultural Literacy. The book proposed that all public schoolchildren should be provided with instruction aimed at familiarizing them with a wide variety of topics, including literature, geography, history, math, science, art and music, in order to have the background knowledge that would make them successful readers and learners. But the book, subtitled “What Every American Needs To Know,” quickly became famous not for its seven dense chapters of educational theory but for The List — a 63-page index of 5,000 essential subjects and concepts that Hirsch believed teachers should impart to their students, arrayed in alphabetical order: A.D., ad absurdum, adagio, Adam and Eve, Adams, John.
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The liberals of America’s educational establishment, meanwhile, responded to Cultural Literacy as if it were a manifesto for what one called “a new cultural offensive” aimed at writing the common man out of history. The book, they insisted, was a traditionalist polemic that would replace higher-order thinking in the classroom with a dry-as-dust set of increasingly irrelevant names, dates and places. As for Hirsch, they saw him as little better than a lone reactionary trying to prevent the tide of multiculturalism from eroding the hegemony of the vanishing WASP.
Even now Hirsch can’t hide his irritation. The lifelong Democrat — “I’m practically a socialist,” he insists — was particularly rankled to find himself described by a Harvard education professor as “a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education.” “I was,” he says, “inundated by irrationality.”
But the progressives, while dominant, have been unable to improve educational outcomes for low-income students, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, and today, liberal educators and politicians are giving Hirsch’s ideas a second, much more admiring look. Many now support a set of grade-specific guidelines developed by the National Governors Association in 2009 known as the Common Core State Standards. Hirsch didn’t write the Common Core, but the guidelines match the expectations set forth in the rigorous public school curricula Hirsch developed with his Core Knowledge Foundation, and he is credited with laying the intellectual groundwork.
“He showed the fundamental importance that knowledge plays to develop the foundations of literacy,” says David Coleman, one of the chief architects of the Common Core, who calls Hirsch’s research “absolutely foundational.”
Hirsch himself started in public schools until a prolonged illness led him to a progressive private school with project-based learning.
His big idea came to him while his was conducting research at a community college near UVA, where he was head of the English department:
There, he observed that the largely African-American low-income students could read short works of narrative fiction but could barely wring meaning from a piece about Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox because they lacked basic knowledge about the Civil War. “What I saw is that background knowledge really mattered,” Hirsch says.
Over time, he expanded on this idea until his central observation ran like this: Children can be taught to read — to decode words — but teaching them to comprehend all but the simplest text requires a shared body of knowledge between writer and reader. For example, when a biographer describes her subject’s central flaw as his “Achilles’ heel” or a disastrous turn of events as a “Waterloo,” people who have acquired a passing knowledge of mythology and European history can easily understand that the first means a potentially devastating personal vulnerability and the second, a staggering defeat. But others just don’t get anything from the words themselves.
Knowing the national language of culture, even haphazardly, has a vast, far-reaching and brutally cumulative impact on learning. For those who begin their education with sufficient stores of background knowledge, it forms a virtuous circle: They have higher levels of reading comprehension, which helps them understand the daily social, intellectual and political discourse, which in turn helps them obtain more background knowledge. Those who do not have it languish. To level the playing field between rich and poor, schools should intentionally build background knowledge in all children in a wide range of subjects, or, says Hirsch, “It will be impossible to break the cycle of illiteracy that persists from parent to child.”