E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Infobox Person
name = Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr.


image_size = 150px
caption =
birth_date = birth date and age|1928|3|22
birth_place = Memphis, Tennessee, USA
death_date =
death_place =
other_names =
known_for =
occupation = literary critic, educator, and writer
nationality = American

Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr. (born March 22, 1928) is a U.S. educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his writings about cultural literacy.

Life

Education and early work

Hirsch was raised in Memphis, Tennessee. He graduated from Cornell and earned a doctorate from Yale in 1957. Hirsch began his career as an English professor and a scholar of the romantic poets. His early publications include "Wordsworth and Schelling" (1960), an adaptation of his Yale dissertation, and "Innocence and Experience" (1964), a monograph on Blake.

The second phase of his career centered on questions of literary interpretation and hermeneutics. His books "Validity in Interpretation" (1967) and "The Aims of Interpretation" (1976) argue, against many new critical and postmodernist claims to the contrary, that the author's intention must be the ultimate determiner of meaning. Hirsch proposed the distinction between "meaning" (as intended by the author) and "significance" (as perceived by a reader or critic).

Concern for cultural literacy

In 1977 Hirsch published "The Philosophy of Composition", an investigation into the question of what makes prose more or less readable. His work on composition led to a major shift in his career. While giving tests of relative readability at two colleges in Virginia, he discovered that, while the relative readability of a text was an important factor in determining comprehension, an even more important factor was background knowledge. Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Grant and Lee, while students at a community college struggled with the passage, apparently because they lacked basic understanding of the American Civil War. This and related discoveries led Hirsch to formulate the concept of cultural literacy -- the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. He concluded that schools should not be agnostic about what is taught but should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to understand things writers take for granted.

Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986, and wrote "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know" in 1987. He also co-wrote [http://www.bartleby.com/59/ The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy] in 1988. Cultural Literacy became a best-seller and was even spoofed on Saturday Night Live. But Hirsch's ideas were extremely controversial. Although himself a liberal, he was attacked as a neo-conservative and advocate for a conservative, lily-white curriculum, a promoter of "drill and kill" pedagogy and a reactionary force. His theories have been criticized for not addressing supposed differences in learning styles and for a lack of information about minorities.

Beginning in 1997 Hirsch began publishing books in the Core Knowledge Series. Each book focuses on the content knowledge that should be taught to each particular elementary grade level. There are different books covering kindergarten through sixth grades, plus at least one book outlining an overview of what should be covered in the whole elementary curriculum.

In 1996, Hirsch published "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them". In it, Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning". Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.

A closer look at Romanticism, from "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them": "Romanticism believed that human nature is innately good, and should therefore be encouraged to take its natural course, unspoiled by the artificial impositions of social prejudice and convention. Second, Romanticism concluded that a child is neither a scaled-down, ignorant version of the adult nor a formless piece of clay in need of molding, rather, the child is a special being in its own right with unique, trustworthy impulses that should be allowed to develop and run their course."

His most recent book is "The Knowledge Deficit" (2006), in which he once again makes the case that the cause of disappointing reading performance is a lack of background knowledge.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a board member of the Albert Shanker Institute. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Further reading

For a critical view of Hirsch, see "The Schools Our Children Deserve" by Alfie Kohn.

References

cite web
last = Kaufer
first = David S.
title = Cultural Literacy: A Critique of Hirsch and an Alternative Theory
publisher = ADE Bulletin
date = Winter 1989
url = http://www.mla.org/ade/bulletin/n094/094023.htm
accessdate = 2006-09-21

External links

* [http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/index.htm Core Knowledge Foundation]
* [http://www.hoover.org/bios/hirsch.html Information at Hoover Institution]