E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016)

Through his writings and organizational work (establishing the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986), Hirsch has done more than anybody else to promote the importance of knowledge - rather than generic skills and "creativity" - in education. In this persuasive book, he presents evidence that our educational system has been failing for much longer than I understood - since the 1960s, reading comprehension scores of American 17-year-olds have been declining or flat. He attributes this failure to three key ideas of progressive pedagogy: that children's natural curiosity, inclinations, and developmental stages should guide teaching; that education needs to be tailored to each individual ("child-centered" pedagogy is a phrase one hears constantly, and without further explanation, as if its value were self-evident, in these parts); and, most fatally, that schools should aim to teach general skills, rather than knowledge. Hirsch offers plenty of evidence in his indictment of these erroneous idea, but perhaps his most telling evidence comes from France, where a knowledge-centered curriculum was replaced, in 1989, by a progressive approach. Over the next two decades, French education declined on all sorts of measures (see below for more on these criteria). Finally, Hirsch presents his alternative, vocabulary-building and knowledge-rich, curriculum in some detail, and again proffers significant evidence as to its efficacy. In what, though, does this efficacy consist, according to Hirsch? For Hirsch, the advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum are three fold: it improves all students' chances of becoming competent, successful adults; it especially helps students from poor and otherwise deprived backgrounds, thus helping to close the achievement gap (something that Hirsch comes back to repeatedly); finally, a common foundation of knowledge is necessary for meaningful citizenship, and hence for the health of our democracy. Since his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which put him on the map in the education wars, Hirsch has often been tarred as a conservative. (It didn't help him in this regard that Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was, in fact, conservative, came out the same year.) In fact, though, Hirsch's approach is not conservative in any simple sense of the term. It's true that he believes that for children to become successful (in a broad sense of the term) adults, they have to be familiar with what what other adults know - the shared knowledge of the culture, a public good. He thus values this knowledge for pragmatic reasons. But he acknowledges - and even welcomes the fact - that what's shared can grow and change. Another criticism has been that Hirsch's approach requires an even greater emphasis on testing than is the case now. In fact, however, Hirsch expresses criticism of the current scale (and content) of testing, which absorbs a large portion of school time and which, given the fundamental error of trying to teach students generic skills, is bound to produce poor results and frustrated students, teachers, and parents. Hirsch's argument resonates with, and greatly deepens, what I've seen during my last decade of teaching high school. Students' vocabularies and knowledge of the world are suprisingly limited and fragmented. Too seldom does one feel part of a system that is building systematic knowledge.