Core Convictions

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a slightly awkward man with a quick smile, seems an unlikely combatant in the culture wars. Once best known in academic circles as a literary critic, author, English professor, and scholar of hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation of texts, Hirsch was catapulted to the center of the culture debate with the publication of his 1987 book Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin).

Since then, Hirsch has become a lightning rod for criticism from multiculturalists in the academy. Said Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1997: "[Hirsch] has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a 'core knowledge' orientation, then I want no part of it." But Hirsch's supporters, including national organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers, argue that his work espousing a coherent and content-rich curriculum for American students has been an indispensable part of school improvement.

Hirsch is professor emeritus of education and humanities at theUniversity of Virginia and the founder and chairman of the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education. The organization conducts curriculum research, develops materials for parents and teachers and offers professional development to help elementary and middle schools deliver a solid, specific and shared core curriculum that enables children to develop strong foundations of knowledge.

Hirsch has a new book out, The Knowledge Deficit (Houghton Mifflin 2006), that is ostensibly focused on reading, but is really a distillation of his primary educational argument and the premise of the work of the Core Knowledge Foundation: Curriculum matters.

In May, 2006, Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham sat down with Hirsch in Charlottesville, Virginia, to talk about his new book, the links between his work in education and literary scholarship, school choice, the standards movement, and the politics of education.

Education Sector: Describe your background; it wasn't in K–12 education, was it?

E.D. Hirsch: I started out getting a Ph.D. in English, and my first work was in the English Romantic period. I wrote a book on Wordsworth, that was my dissertation. Then I wrote a book on William Blake and got interested for various reasons in theory of interpretation and wrote a book on that. After that, for a moment, I was on top of the academic ladder.

ES: How did that lead you to work in K–12 education?

EH: The theory of interpretation is in a sense a theory of reading, so my work led me to reading cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. One of the interesting things that came out in the '70s and '80s in psycholinguistics was the fact that what people say is only the tip of the iceberg for meaning. To understand what's being said, the individuals who are conversing have to share a lot of unspoken knowledge and attitudes. Well, you can jump right from that insight into everything I've done in education.

For example, there's a striking experiment I did in Richmond,Va., in the 1970s. It was just at the moment psycholinguists found how much background knowledge had to do with reading. People were given passages to read. We thought we could detect from the responses to the passages how well or badly the pieces were written, but it turned out that instead of testing how well or badly written passages were, our experiments were exposing how much background knowledge people had. When it turned out that passages required just a little bit of out-of-the-ordinary background knowledge, then it became clear that what we were testing was not how good the writing was but what the people knew.

This experiment was done in different places. One set of audiences was at the University of Virginia and, just to be sure it wasn't sociologically slanted, another was at a community college, J. Sergeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, where the students were mainly black. One passage was about Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, and it was clear that the black students at the community college were unfamiliar with Grant and Lee—and this was in Richmond! So it threw me for a loop, and that's what really started it.

Intellectually, you find out that reading is not a mechanical operation but something that depends on a lot of shared knowledge, that's the connection between the technical and theoretical work I did in learning how to read.

Cultural Literacy made the claim that literacy required cultural literacy, which is actually true, but it was very unfortunate that the term "culture" happened to be used there. It would be much better if I said communication within a speech community requires unspoken shared knowledge, knowledge of conventions, knowledge of shared things.

ES: That phrase certainly dragged you into the culture wars. If you had it to do again, would you phrase it differently?

EH: Yeah, I'd phrase it differently if it worked better to say speech community instead of culture. Sounds more neutral. It was actually a neutral observation, though it sounds like I was defending white, Anglo-Saxon culture.

Politics

ES: What are your politics?

EH: I've never voted Republican. I've always voted Democrat. And actually I've always thought of myself—though I've changed somewhat in this—as a quasi-socialist, and a sense of social justice is my chief animating emotion. I don't like great inequalities in the social landscape. I'm egalitarian, I guess. And that's what motivated me from an ideological sense, but it had nothing to do with the character of the technical analysis, which I have to say has never been challenged.

ES: You have been labeled a conservative. Has that served to marginalize some of your ideas?

EH: Yes. Conservative and traditional are terms that are death in the educationist world. And it's been that way since the early teens of the last century; the dominant view has been against traditionalism and against content. We mustn't forget that the dominant view in American education is an anti-content view in the sense that it's against having content that is set out in advance to be delivered to the student. This has become the dominant line in education, so the real reason I'm labeled conservative and traditional in economic spheres is that I'm going against that line in the education sphere. And if that line of view had been correct—if it had been technically right, if it had worked and been consistent with social justice—that would have been fine with me. The problem is it's technically incorrect as an account of reading and of what we need to do to get students to read proficiently. So the accusation that I'm traditionalist or conservative is irrelevant. The reality of communication is that the unsaid is just as active in communication as the said. So, we have to give these kids the unsaid, that's the long and short of it, and if you don't, they won't be able to communicate and they won't be able to learn.

Democrats basically didn't talk to me because they assumed I was a Republican, which is not true. But that, to me, was the most disappointing aspect of the whole adventure—the knee-jerk politicizing of what are, in my view, intellectual and technical questions. Is phonics the right way to teach reading? That's not a Republican versus Democrat question; it's a question of how do you learn how to sound out best, and, in this case, how do you overcome the achievement gap between demographic groups?

Core Knowledge Foundation

ES: Why did you start the Core Knowledge Foundation?

EH: I started it before any of these books came out because I saw what we're talking about. In fact, it was first called the Cultural Literacy Foundation and teachers said "Don't call it that, we'll just get into a lot of trouble." So we called it Core Knowledge, which sounds more neutral.

When the book [Cultural Literacy] came out, it was pretty disorienting because I got a lot of enthusiastic response from teachers and from the general public and a lot of interest, "20 questions" sort of interest. But then I started getting reviews, and they were all very hostile; everything that came from the education world was hostile. And it really surprised me because I thought the argument was clear and the evidence was quite clear, and it still is.

But, as I discovered, [the hostility] didn't have to do with the arguments and the evidence; it had to do with currents and perceived ideas within the education world and with what was happening then in the universities. The feeling in the universities at that time was that it was very important to change American culture through feminism and multiculturalism, and this book came out right in the middle of all that, so its message got diverted. I was paired with [The Closing of the American Mindauthor] Alan Bloom—that was an interesting part of the phenomenon: His book and my book came out the same month. So I got tagged as conservative, which is not intellectually or politically true. I think that's been the chief problem for Core Knowledge.

It was very clear that the opponents of Core Knowledge within the university and the educational power structure wanted to make it go away. Absolutely quash it. Actually make it disappear. It was not an argument; they wanted to make it disappear. So we persisted and there's still a struggle, but maybe progress has been made. I think there's a paradoxical relationship between Core Knowledge now and No Child Left Behind. I'm told people think that Core Knowledge influenced the standards movement. But clearly the standards movement and NCLB have been very bad for the spread of Core Knowledge schools because people say "We can't do Core Knowledge because we have to do state standards," or, "We can't do that because we have to do reading and math." And, of course, with time it will become clear that they will do better on state standards and do better in reading if they have a coherent curriculum. But it will take time. I keep feeling that maybe there's a change in the air.

ES: How do you respond to the criticism that Core Knowledge focuses on content at the expense of understanding?

EH: Two misconceptions are used to caricature Core Knowledge. One is that it's highly instructivist, as they say. That is, the teacher gets up before the class and fills the children's heads with a lot of information and doesn't allow them constructive time to understand things or work things out for themselves. That's not valid because we have never prescribed pedagogy. And anything that works—as we discussed earlier —anything that works is fine with me. From a technical standpoint, there is a question of just how well some methods do work, but that's a separate issue; it's not an ideological stance toward one pedagogy or another. There are times when you want progressive pedagogy—where it really works.

The other misconception is the caricature that Core Knowledge is memorizing a list of facts. I'm partly responsible for that because there was a list of names or words at the back ofCultural Literacy in 1987; and of course, if you wanted to, you could take and memorize that list, but that would be pretty stupid. It was an index, and it was supposed to indicate things that people take for granted without explaining them. It stands for a whole complex of things that lie behind the words. So there were not implications for curriculum in any Core Knowledge school—not that all kids should memorize facts. Rather, there's a set of things that imply a curriculum or imply a principle of selectivity for curriculum. The whole principle of selectivity is: What are the names and things that have the most bang from the standpoint of students being able to comprehend what they hear and read? And that was the reason for the selection.

So, I think the two biggest misconceptions about Core Knowledge are that it's really drill and kill and that it's conservative politically in its impulses. It's true that literate culture is conservative in that the things that we all take for granted are rather slow to shift. But in fact, if you really want to be effective in changing power structure or the society, you had better be able to manage that machinery. It's a real paradox that all these people damned the book [Cultural Literacy], but in doing so demonstrate their own cultural literacy, because they're using allusions that only a person who is extremely well educated could understand. There is this kind of strange elitism in the reaction of the academic left to Cultural Literacy, which is very egalitarian in its impulses.

ES: What do you see as the biggest problem in American education right now?

EH: I'm always quoting cases that show ideas are more potent than self interest. Ideas have gotten us into the fix that we're in right now in American education, and unless we change the ideas we're not going to get out of it. What I'm doing is right at the center of the old debate that's been going on now for almost 100 years in American education. But it's gotten much more salient now, with literacy rates down, and the gap as great as it is between ethnic and racial groups. It's clear that until there's a change of ideas, until the importance of content and effective use of school time in gaining the content needed to be a functioning communicator and reader and learner, until that idea wins out I don't think we will make any significant progress.

I think it's too bad that we have a guru principle that is very powerful in education. I didn't want to be a guru by any means. … As a matter of fact, in the late 1980s, at the height of the criticism of me when Cultural Literacy came out, I thought, "Well, I'm just John the Baptist—my head needs to be cut off, and we need some Jesus to come along, because I can see I'm never going to be Jesus or Moses or whatever." And I still think that's right: We need someone to come along to rephrase it or give it the right color, the right words, so that the ideas catch on. It's very hard to change ideas, but I think that's a key issue.

ES: How does school choice intersect with the curriculum issue?

EH: I think if people were given a choice, they would tend to want to go to the school that was next door if it happened to be a good school. So my aim is—I think the choice debate would be irrelevant if we could make all our schools good. That's what I'm most interested in. After all, choice is just a free market-oriented technique where you give incentives and start competition presumably in order to make the schools better. That's not working too well because the choice schools and the charter schools aren't that much better than the regular schools—maybe they are a little bit better, OK, let's argue about that, but not all that much better. Until we make the neighborhood public school a really good school we won't have succeeded and we won't really have choice. There are some places in the world where a state school, a government school, the neighborhood school tends to be a good school. Denmark is a good example of that. There are a lot of places where it works. Why can't we have that? That's where I think the choice issue is. I don't want to appear to be against choice, and to the extent that it works—fine. But the real way is to improve all the schools, and then you have real choice, obviously.

People seem to think of choice and standards as being at odds in the policy sphere, but I don't see why logically they are, unless you want the idea of choice to go all the way down so that it involves curriculum, too. But then you have to remember mobility. Choice assumes that the kids will stay in that school. But if you are in the central city, the kids are not going to stay. I know people in the choice movement who are uneasy with the idea of specifying grade-by-grade content, because they feel that takes away choice. If I had to make that decision, if I myself had to choose between the choice movement and the standards movement, I would choose the standards movement if the standards movement had definite standards. Intellectually, that's what I'd do. Right now, neither movement has got coherence at the level of content or curriculum.

ES: How about teacher quality? You argue in Knowledge Deficitthat schools can do a lot better with the teachers they have now if they have a better curriculum.

EH: The evidence that you can do more with average teachers is all these countries that do better than we do with average teachers. There are three points to be made about teacher quality even if you have an exceptional teacher. An exceptional teacher in an incoherent system is worn down and can't actually accomplish as much. If an exceptional teacher is given a class of students with huge disparities in their preparation, then no matter how good the teacher is, that's going to be a harder task than teaching a classroom where the whole class can get certain things at one time and can make progress as a group. Of course, that's never going to be completely the case, but it is going to be more the case if you have a coherent system where everybody is prepared for the next grade. So if we had wonderful teachers and we still persisted in our incoherent system, we'd still get bad results.

The second point is that the quality of the teacher changes in different environments. If instead of having to be a one-man band in conducting a classroom, the task were more manageable and easier, then a perfectly average person might be able to get better results. Third, if our teachers had better education themselves—it's not their fault that they are ill-educated—then that, too, would alter teacher quality. It isn't as though it were an innate thing.

My colleague Dan Willingham makes a really good point about teacher quality. Assume you give higher pay—you suddenly pay teachers $150,000 a year—and you get types of people that are now working as lawyers in offices or other high-paying jobs and put them in a classroom. Are you really so sure they would be good teachers? There's an emotional dimension to teaching that isn't necessarily captured by that, and some of these people who aren't so high-powered might be extremely good teachers, but they aren't going to be able to be in this incoherent system.

ES: You mentioned earlier that some people saw Core Knowledge as being about influencing the standards movement but that it wasn't. How do standards relate to what you're talking about?

EH: I always had the hope that the standards movement would improve the situation, but of course what happened was that it extruded Core Knowledge and slowed the progress of Core Knowledge in making inroads to the schools because people thought they couldn't teach state standards and Core Knowledge at the same time. This, of course, wasn't true because the state standards were so vague and generalized that they really weren't standards.

What I think of as a standard is saying that you know you're going to do the Egyptians in first grade, and there are certain things about the Egyptians that you are going to learn and that's not going to be the whole story, but at least we know that in first grade you learn about the Egyptians. I haven't yet seen elementary curricula at the state level that had that kind of specificity, but if you don't have that kind of specificity they are not really standards and they are not doing the job that they need to do.

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