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by Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, and author of The Reading Mind and Why Don’t Students Like School?

This post, which originally appeared on Daniel Willingham’s Science and Education blog, is re-posted here with the permission of the author. 

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. 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!

On Thursday, March 22, we celebrate the 90th birthday of the founder of Core Knowledge, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Please join us (and the students at Urban Pathways School in Pittsburgh) in wishing Dr. Hirsch Happy Birthday!—and feel free to share your good wishes in the comments section below.

“Don,” as he is fondly called here at the Foundation, remains a vital and consistent voice of reason, consistently affirming the need for a coherent, sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum as the key to educational equity and excellence.

In a series of books—from Cultural Literacy in 1987 to Why Knowledge Matters in 2016—Don has tirelessly and eloquently made the case that “the unifying aim of early schooling” should be to impart “the enabling knowledge that is possessed by the most successful adults in the wider society.”

In 2014, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation paid tribute to the far-reaching power of Don’s ideas in a collection titled Knowledge at the Core. You can read a selection of Don’s shorter writings here on the Core Knowledge website.

Here at the Foundation, we’re ever grateful for the intellectual leadership Don has provided, and we’re looking forward to new insights and inspiration to come. To mark this 90th birthday milestone, we’re going to look back at one of the earliest signposts on the long and winding road to where we are today. We’re going all the way back to an article published in 1983, in the journal The American Scholar.

The article was written before the movement became known as Core Knowledge and speaks instead about the concept identified in the article’s title—“Cultural Literacy.” As you’ll see in these excerpts, more than three decades ago the seeds were planted that have since flowered in the many publications of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the network of Core Knowledge schools.

 

The Core Knowledge Foundation has partnered with the Civics Renewal Network (CRN), an alliance of more than thirty nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations working to provide free online resources to educators for classroom instruction in civics.

According to their website, CRN is “committed to strengthening civic life in the U.S. by increasing the quality of civics education in our nation’s schools and by improving accessibility to high-quality, no-cost learning materials. On the Civics Renewal Network site, teachers can find the best resources of these organizations, searchable by subject, grade, resource type, standards, and teaching strategy.”

Free downloadable resources made available by the Core Knowledge Foundation on CRN’s website include a number of American history units in the Core Knowledge History and GeographyTM (CKHG) series. These resources feature The Pathway to Citizenship, an array of specific topics, questions, and activities that focus on the rights and duties of citizenship, including key historical events, ideas, documents, laws, and the structure of American government.

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In a recent article in the online journal Democracy, Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch, Jr. notes that the “democratic responsibilities” of our nation’s schools “must include teaching the national public culture to all, and encouraging loyalty to the national community and to its best ideals. That will require American schools to teach a lot more history and civics, including the basic Enlightenment principles of the nation.”

The Core Knowledge Foundation aims to support the teaching of “a lot more history and civics” by making our CKHG American history resources freely available, not only through our own website but also through partnering with the Civics Renewal Network. We encourage you to visit CRN’s website and explore the free civics curriculum resources offered by their partner organizations.