E.D. Hirsch, Jr. was the originator the Core Knowledge program and the author of the best-selling book, Cultural Literacy. He championed a knowledge-rich curriculum, believing that access to shared knowledge was necessary for all children. His book was very controversial when it appeared, because many academics and educators thought it was wrong to make up a list of words and phrases that “everyone should know.” But Hirsch persisted and continues to persist.
Using the proceeds from his book, he established the Core Knowledge Foundation and he issued lists of words and phrases for every grade. (I served on the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation in the 1990s.) When the Common Core standards were released in 2009, he lauded them, thinking that they embodied the essence of his philosophy.
Now, however, he has second thoughts. He sees the Common Core as the same contentless methodology that he always opposed.
For nearly three decades, E.D. Hirsch Jr. has been beating the drum on a simple idea, though one that’s proved a hard sell: To become good readers and communicators, U.S. students need a shared curriculum that teaches them about science, history, math, geography, literature, and the arts.
In other words, more than skills and strategies, students need knowledge.
His philosophy first came to the general public’s attention in 1987 when, as head of the English department at the University of Virginia, he wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. The book included an appendix listing about 5,000 names, dates, places, and ideas—everything from the adrenal gland to zeitgeist—that students should learn in school.
The list made the book a best-seller—and it also made Hirsch persona non grata in plenty of liberal education circles. He was labeled Eurocentric and an elitist, and many wrote off his ideas entirely.
But Hirsch, an avowed liberal who champions the idea that having students learn the same things will lead to equal opportunities for all, hasn’t backed down. And now, at age 88, he’s at it again with a new book about the need for a knowledge-based curriculum. The book’s publication comes as Hirsch is seeing his theories rebound and creep their way into more schools, teacher trainings, and instructional materials—largely, many say, thanks to the Common Core State Standards.
But in Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, Hirsch excoriates the education policies of the day, including—interestingly—the use of the common core.
The reading standards’ focus on all-purpose comprehension skills rather than content, while it may be politically necessary, is “a deep misfortune,” he said.
“It’s a pointless approach,” he concludes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So is anybody writing a knowledge, content driven set of standards?
ED Hirsch wrote content standards but the tests are all about skills, not content
I can’t wait to read this book.
Removed our 3 children from public school as CCSS were being ushered in w/ gusto. Our kids, especially our bright but struggling child w/ SLD, we’re miserable despite some dedicated teachers! All were enrolled in a private Christian school that uses Hirsch’s Core Knowledge. We’ve been very impressed w/ the content and richness it brings to the classroom. Our children are engaged & have thrived beyond expectations. Our oldest entered HS this year, very well prepared, & w/ a much broader base of knowledge than the majority of her peers, per teacher reports. With a solid base of literature, history, art, language, science, & math, our kids have been able to “fill in the blanks.” In other words, they have a knowledge bank that allows them to decode, make reasonable inferences, or scaffold when faced w/ an unknown or new challenge. While we didn’t anticipate having to sacrifice in order to pay for private school, I’ve never regretted it. Our kids are loved, teachers are limited only by their imagination to reach each child, and our once struggling child no longer cries & says he wants to die before school each day. Now a Duke TIP qualifier. The best parenting decision we’ve made, hands down, was to run fast from CCSS!
I recall reading Hirsch’s book. I accepted his idea that certain poetic images made language more efficient. It is easier to call someone a Hitler than it is to describe their totalitarian ways. But there seemed a problem, and I have never gotten my mind around it.
How can we promote a healthy diversity of thought if we delineate precisely what an educated person looks like? We recently lost a wonderful,friend to cancer. She was possibly the best educated person I ever met. She could go into one room and have a conversation with her grandchild, then go into another room for a talk with a professor. She was self educated. She read books. Everything fascinated her.
People like her make me think that one size fits all is a problem, whether it be knowledge or skill based does not matter. One size fits all is bad.
There is no better argument for adopting Hirsch’s approach to learning than the recent election results. Without inculcating a core of knowledge the emphasis on reading comprehension skills is indeed pointless. National ignorance of our culture will only produce more and more Trumps.
YES: fascist leaders depend upon social ignorance.
My understanding of Hirsch is that while he has a dedicated list of words/knowledge for each grade level, he also gives a lot of leeway for teachers to add to that list, that accounts for personal teacher knowledge, children’s interest, etc.
As I understand it, Hirsch’s ideal system of education, would be required of all students much like the CCSS was envisioned, but it would focus on studies in the arts, sciences, and humanities (sans foreign language for all) with skills in the reading, writing, speaking, listening, and mathematical understandings taught as an integral part of learning in and about the arts, sciences, and humanities. I noticed that Hirsch was quick to rebrand and release his curriculum framework to become “aligned” with the CCSS. I am pleased to see he has disengaged from his early endorsement of the CCSS. I will add this book to my reading list.
I read Hirsch’s latest, “Why Knowledge Matters,” and found it to be a thoroughly researched and carefully, clearly stated argument for a knowledge-based curriculum. Beside expressing his disappointment with the Common Core LA standards (and standards-based approach to LA in general), he gives a cogent condemnation of the use of standardized reading tests to judge the progress of students, teachers, and schools.
Every Language Arts teacher, every school administrator, and every politician involved in education policy in the U.S. should read Hirsch’s book.
In a recent conversation between Fareed Zakaria and Leon Botstein, Zakaria pointed out that even though American students have scored badly on international achievement tests since their inception in 1963, the US is number one in technology, innovation, invention, and economic power, providing some evidence for the critical thinking and problem solving skills approach to education.
In that same conversation, Zakaria informed his audience that today’s society has become super segregated, in that the rich live with the rich, the upper middle class lives with the upper middle class, the lower class lives with the lower class and the poor live with the poor, creating among other things, political segregation. This supported his statement that a student coming from a poor class to college does not know how to speak to a student coming to college from another economic class.
E.D. Hirsch’s communal-knowledge-content curriculum would, in Hirsch’s opinion, still lead to critical thinking and problem solving, but raise test score levels to match or exceed those countries that are beating us now; plus, and this is an important plus; by every elementary school teaching a standard core of knowledge to all students, disadvantaged and advantaged alike. it would, on a knowledge basis, later serve to desegregate, by permitting not only entering college students to be able to talk with one another, but, in the end, providing the best chance, the only chance, perhaps, for a reduction of the inequality suffocating so many of our people today.
And that inequality isn’t just stifling individual citizens; it threatens to destroy that cohesiveness required for a functioning and always vigilant community protecting inalienable civil rights, including “life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness”, the fabric of democracy itself.
Darrell,
I was on the board of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, and I long supported the idea of a common curriculum.
The Common Core has shown us how hard it will be to bring that to pass. As Hirsch belatedly discovered, it is mostly skills, not the kind of content he favors.
If there are fights over the Common Core, you can imagine the fights that will occur when you try to define “what every American should know.” I have worked on state history curricula, and I can tell you it is a knock-down battle among ethnic and religious and racial groups to get their story told the way they think it should be told.
I have also learned that you can give exactly the same curriculum to all students in a class or a school, and there will still be achievement gaps. The knowledge gap is not the only gap. The income inequality gap is even more important.
Read my latest revision of “Death and Life of the Great American School System” where I explain this.
Darrell:
The odds that such a prescribed course of study might be the key to social equality must be close to zero.
Set aside the fact that no matter what and how you teach, if you try to measure efficacy by giving a test, the test results for any group are likely to approximate a normal (Gaussian) distribution. If you believe in testing, that would indicate that more than half of all students will not have internalized the material. So the expected benefits of being exposed to that knowledge, presumably, wouldn’t take hold for most.
The idea that exposing every student to the same knowledge will necessarily result in critical thinking and problem solving (especially while de-emphasizing actual practice in thinking and problem solving) is also suspect.
There’s evidence that cognitive diversity–and that would include the variability of individual knowledge bases among members of a group–results in better performance for the group. In a successful classroom, students will learn as much on their own and from each other as they learn from a canned curriculum.
Ditto for teachers. Teachers learn from students with a diversity of backgrounds, just as a diversity of teacher knowledge and style enriches the students’ school experience.
My own experience as a student and as a teacher tells me that forced uniformity in education is a detriment, not a benefit.
For all those expecting to find a content-rich set of academic standards, the last places you would look are the disciplines of math and ELA. Even before Common Core, these were always essentially skills based subjects. Math is the antithesis of a knowledge based program and has always done the disservice of rendering numbers meaningless (to the vast majority of students). English has traditionally been a very soft subject in which parts of speech and literary devices were put on a back burner in favor of a literature based approach that focused on feelings and opinions. Common Core standards did little to change this because math and ELA are simply not the disciplines where we find a wealth of interesting, inherent content knowledge anyway. Substituting the fuzzziness of literature with a search for “text based evidence” was never going to satisfy Hirsch’s desire for a universal “core of knowledge”.
The real fault lies in the unintended consequence of linking the Common Core standards to ultra-high stakes tests. If Hirsch really wanted a content rich set of national standards. he should have been blasting this misplaced focus on math and ELA and been begging for a strong set of standards in science, technology, geography, economics, government, history, psychology, sociology, and even the arts and music.
ED Hirsch finally calling out the Common Core for failing to provide a rich, knowledge based education is a welcome, albeit misplaced, declaration. Could Rob Pondiscio be next to finally see the light? Eh Rob?
Was the link between the CC and high stakes test really unintended? Seems to me it is another attempt to create a test no one can pass, having failed to hurt teachers and students enough with previous efforts.
Roy,
Most certainly, the CCSS were always intended to be linked to tests. The grand plan was to have a completely coherent closed system of standards, tests, teacher education, professional development, curriculum, materials, and college entrance exams, all woven together. As soon as the standards were released, Arne Duncan awarded $360 million to two testing consortia to develop tests aligned to the standard.
NOT the “link” between standards and testing – that was very much intentional. I was alluding to the unintended consequence of expanding the null curriculum by virtually eliminating science and social studies and the arts in lieu of test-prep centered programs.
I agree with many of Posts. Curriculum, while needing to be content rich, as well as skills based, needs to be negotiated. A basic curriculum question has always been: “Whose knowledge is of most value?” And this question has been debated by the likes of Dewey, Counts, and more recently, Apple, Null and a myriad of others. Deliberating the curriculum is an approach that can work because it acknowledges and respects all stakeholders, their needs and their differences.
I have read his books and I think his ideas are good and doable and workable and I don’t feel his concepts are closed or repressive. We had a french student – 17 years old – stay with us – he talked about politics, culture, french history,- easily, comfortably.
I love the conclusion in this thread.
[start thread’s conclusion]
The reading standards’ focus on all-purpose comprehension skills rather than content, while it may be politically necessary, is “a deep misfortune,” he said.
“It’s a pointless approach,” he concludes.
[end thread’s conclusion]
I always wonder the concept of time and money which is life and death, or happiness versus misery.
Philosophers and scientists, who can offer the best strategy or curriculum to learners?
Is it COMMON CORE or common in greed, ego and lust for fame and fortune?
Where are the common knowledge in humanity, civility and self-respect for the decency in humankind? (= alleviating the sufferance in the unfortunate)
In short, I would like to repeat the author’s conclusion, “It’s a pointless approach” [= “to be greedy, lusty and malicious in leadership”]. Back2basic
Why E.D. Hirsch’s particular brand of “science” is powerless to challenge direct instruction
Authored by Dr Hugh Morrison (The Queen’s University of Belfast (retired)
The cover page of the Times Education Supplement (TES) quotes the distinguished American educationalist E D Hirsch’s claim that “there is no scientific basis for direct instruction.” Given the high regard in which Hirsch is held by educational traditionalists, there will be widespread dismay that one of their own is invoking science to attack a traditional pedagogical technique that can see off any progressivist model when it comes to raising the educational standards of poor children. (Readers who Google the words “direct instruction” will see why this classroom approach is so important to traditionalists.) Hirsch clearly appreciates that the reasoning set out in his new book may not be received with universal acclaim: “To offend everybody is one of the few prerogatives left to old age.” The good news for proponents of direct instruction everywhere is that the “science” Hirsch appeals to makes no sense.
The basis of Hirsch’s TES “scientific” attack is the field of cognitive science. To convince his readers that his book represents “consensus science” he has invited two prominent cognitive scientists, Steven Pinker and Daniel Willingham, to “blurb” the book. Now cognitive scientists hold that psychological attributes like thought, understanding, memory, meaning, and so on, are internal processes associated with the human brain/mind. According to cognitive scientists the mind/brain is a self-contained realm where computations are performed on mental “representations.” However, one of the towering figures of 20th century thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded this type of thinking as deeply misconceived. He wrote that:
“The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a “young science”: its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. … For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.”
In their 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience Max Bennet and Peter Hacker use Wittgensteinian reasoning to attack cognitive neuroscience’s central claims. In the remainder of this essay the “consensus science” which informs Hirsch’s claims is undermined using the writings of Bennett and Hacker. The reader needs neither a background in cognitive psychology nor a grounding in philosophy to appreciate immediately the validity of Wittgenstein’s “conceptual confusion” claim; a healthy dose of common sense will reveal immediately the error at the heart of cognitive science.
While it is clear that thinking would be impossible without a properly functioning brain, the claim that brains can think or that thinking takes place in the brain ought to be supported with scientific evidence. No such evidence exists. To mistakenly attribute properties to the brain which are, in fact, properties of the human being is to fall prey to what Bennett and Hacker refer to as the “mereological fallacy.” (Mereology is concerned with part/whole relations and the fallacy goes all the way back to Aristotle.)
Psychological predicates are predicates that apply essentially to the whole living animal, not to its parts. It is not the eye (let alone the brain) that sees, but we see with our eyes (and we do not see with our brains, although without a brain functioning normally in respect of the visual system, we would not see). So, too, it is not the ear that hears, but the animal whose ear it is. The organs of an animal are part of the animal, and psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not its constituent parts. (pp. 72-73)
Cognitive scientists often refer to brains “thinking,” “knowing,” “believing,” “deciding,” “seeing an image of a cube,” “reasoning,” “learning” and so on.
We know what it is for human beings to experience things, to see things, to know or believe things, to make decisions … But do we know what it is for a brain to see … for a brain to have experiences, to know or believe something? Do we have any conception of what it would be like for a brain to make a decision? … These are all attributes of human beings. Is it a new discovery that brains also engage in such human activities? (p. 70)
In the words of Wittgenstein (1953, §281): “Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious”. If the human brain can learn, “This would be astonishing, and we should want to hear more. We should want to know what the evidence for this remarkable discovery was” (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 71). It is important to appreciate the depth of the error committed here. When the claim that the brain can think is called into question, this doesn’t render valid the assertion that brains, in fact, cannot think.
It is our contention that this application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense. It is not that as a matter of fact brains do not think, hypothesise and decide, see and hear, ask and answer questions; rather, it makes no sense to ascribe such predicates or their negations to the brain. The brain neither sees, nor is it blind – just as sticks and stones are not awake, but they are not asleep either. (p. 72)
One gets the clear impression from the cognitive science literature that understanding or remembering are inner processes. Wittgenstein, while accepting that without a properly functioning brain one couldn’t learn, nevertheless teaches that understanding is something attributed to the whole person, and not the brain. When a teacher asks a pupil what she thinks, the pupil expresses her thoughts in language. Were it not for the pupil’s language skills, the teacher couldn’t ascribe thoughts to her. Since brains aren’t language-using creatures, how can it make sense to ascribe thoughts to a brain?
While cognitive scientists may protest that the brain’s ability to make connections while it (the brain) is learning, is visible from the PET or fMRI images of the brain, scientific writing should always show restraint:
But this does not show that the brain is thinking, reflecting or ruminating; it shows that such-and-such parts of a person’s cortex are active when the person is thinking, reflecting or ruminating. (What one sees on the scan is not the brain thinking – there is no such thing as a brain thinking – nor the person thinking – one can see that whenever one looks at someone sunk in thought, but not by looking at a PET scan – but the computer-generated image of the excitement of cells in his brain that occurs when he is thinking.) (pp. 83-84)
In Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007, p. 143), Bennett and Hacker write:
But if one wants to see thinking going on, one should look at the Le Penseur (or the surgeon operating or the chess player playing or the debater debating), not his brain. All his brain can show is which parts of the brain are metabolizing more oxygen than others when the patient in the scanner is thinking.
chess-player-thinking
In order to see off Hirsch’s ill-founded claims, advocates of direct instruction can appeal to no less a thinker than Aristotle. Around 350BC he wrote: “to say that the soul (psyche) is angry is as if one were to say that the soul weaves or builds. For it is surely better not to say that the soul pities, learns or thinks, but that a man does these with his soul.”