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A Brief Appreciation of E. D. Hirsch

3/26/2018

 
E. D. Hirsch celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago.

What better time to remind ourselves of his contributions to American education? I hope Hirsch will forgive me if I do not dwell here on his practical and arguably greatest contribution—the establishment of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which has both produced outstanding curricular materials (many distributed without cost) and advocated for equitable, outstanding education for all. (I sat on the board of the foundation for some years.)

Instead, I'll focus on three profound ideas that Hirsch developed and explicated, and that have had a substantial influence on my thinking. 

  1. The role of knowledge in reading. Background knowledge is the main driver of language comprehension, whether written or spoken.   Disadvantaged students are disproportionately dependent on schools to provide the background information that will make them effective readers because wealthy students have greater opportunity to gain this knowledge at home. These were the key ideas in Cultural Literacy. That 1987 volume became a best seller mainly because of the list at the back of the book, “What Literate Americans Know.” The list also gave Hirsch the undeserved reputation of an ultra-conservative because he was apparently advocating that school children spend most of their time memorizing the names of dead white males. You couldn’t hold that opinion if you actually read the book, but most people didn’t.
  2. The importance of shared knowledge in citizenship. The American Founders recognized that this country, as a multi-ethnic society, faced a peculiar dilemma among nations; how to encourage a feeling of commonality and mutual responsibility among diverse citizenry? They saw a common body of knowledge as crucial to the cohesiveness of American citizenry where individuals held allegiance to other tribes—English, Scottish, German, etc. In The Making of Americans Hirsch argues for a “civic core,” and for the idea that each of us as individuals can and should have commonality in the public sphere, even as we have individuality and different group allegiances in the private sphere. The former does not diminish the latter.
  3. The seeds of Americans' denigration of knowledge. Why would it be controversial to argue that children should share some common knowledge? The seeds of that idea lay in the Romantic response to the Enlightenment. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers esteemed knowledge of the world, the Romantics emphasized feeling, emotion, and especially esteemed the impulse of the individual. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers would emphasize social institutions as beneficial to human well-being and flourishing, Romantics depicted social institutions as problems, and portrayed humankind in its natural state as sanctified. In The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them and in Why Knowledge Matters, Hirsch has argued that early educational theorists were influenced by Romantics to a degree few appreciate, and that we today are inheritors of their mostly flawed assumptions about human nature. These assumptions lead to a reverence for individuality and for nature, and a corresponding denigration of knowledge deemed important enough for all to know.
 
Needless to say, a paragraph doesn't begin to do justice to each of these ideas. If they are not familiar, I encourage you to explore them further--I've already made it easy by including the links to buy the books!

Vicki Reutter
3/26/2018 01:02:32 pm

I found "Cultural Literacy" on Ebay, back when I was asked to teach a Literacy in Society class to grad students. Just wow. While I had initially bought into the premise of enlarging students' background knowledge to improve reading achievement, in the article, "Beyond Comprehension," I was taken aback by his presumptuous core knowledge curriculum. Dead white guys, obsolete material - all appended in detail. Yet, Common Core has similarly adopted the common curriculum notion in its production of scripted modules adopted and used across the country, in part to combat the issue of students who move with their families from place to place. While there may be a bit more multicultural emphasis, it is still a small fraction of the breadth of historical knowledge, diverse biographies, and local history that I think is as crucial to explore as the stuff of a conforming citizenry. Who is to decide what citizens should know, and what makes a good citizen?

Dan Willingham
3/26/2018 01:37:00 pm

"Who is to decide what citizens should know, and what makes a good citizen?"
To varying degrees, state policymakers, local school boards, district personnel, teachers, and the writers of textbooks. They are deciding what it means to be an educated American, and the types of texts that children will be able to read with comprehension. One of Hirsch's contributions was alerting people to that fact.

Mia Munn
3/26/2018 02:02:54 pm

Who is to decide...? From Cultural Literacy itself:
"This list is provisional; it is intended to illustrate the character and range of the knowledge literate Americans tend to share. More than one hundred consultants reported agreement on over 90 percent of the items listed. But no such compilation can be definitive. Some proposed items were omitted because they seemed to us know by both literate and illiterate persons, too rare, or too transitory. Moreover, different literate Americans have slightly different conceptions of our shared knowledge. The authors see the list as a changing entity, partly because core knowledge changes, partly because inappropriate omissions and inclusions are bound to occur in a first attempt....we do not seek to create a complete catalogue of American knowledge but to establish guideposts that can be of practical use to teachers, students, and all others who need to know our literate culture."
The whole appendix is worth rereading.

Paul Hoss
3/26/2018 05:34:40 pm

For me, Cultural Literacy and Don's Core Knowledge curricula were the necessary predecessors, the blueprint, for standards based reform over the past almost half century in this country. His CL and CK works set the tone for what was missing in our country's schools - a plan. I used his work with my classes as a Massachusetts public school teacher over three and a half decades and felt privileged to have it as a guide.

Chrys Dougherty
3/28/2018 12:24:30 pm

Unfortunately, some current Big Thinkers have developed a new reason to denigrate knowledge - essentially that AI machines will do our knowing for us, so we need to specialize in something different. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHt-5-RyrJk.
Of course, evaluation, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, team participation, creativity, and understanding what the machines tell us will never stop being knowledge-based - unless we expect to enter the brave new world in which we believe that just having a "good brain" enables us to make high-stakes decisions. Or unless we expect to have the machines do all the thinking and judgment calls for us.


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