E. D. Hirsch

Throughout his career, Hirsch denounced the influence of 19th century romanticism on American culture in general, and on progressive educational ideas in particular. He said that romanticism, and writers and artists who espoused the romantic world-view — such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge — "elevated all that is natural and disparaged all that is artificial". Hirsch sees the romanticism-inspired progressivists as being in opposition to the intellectuals — the classicist, the modernist, the pragmatist, and the scientist.

In 2016, he published "Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing our Children from Failed Educational Theories", outlining the three major problems with education in the United States: the emphasis on teaching skills, such as critical thinking skills, rather than knowledge, individualism rather than communal learning, and developmentalism, that is, teaching children what is "appropriate" for their age.

By 2015, Hirsch and his Core Knowledge Foundation, had become an "increasingly popular primary source for the Common Core movement". The emphasis is placed "more on what should be known rather than how to know"—"content knowledge" is central to learning and "knowledge acquisition is treated as a commodity or product to be dispensed".

By 2015, there were about 1,260 schools in the US (across 46 states and District of Columbia) using all or part of the Core Knowledge Sequence. The Foundation believes that the actual number is much higher, but only counts schools that submit a "profile form" to the Foundation annually. The profile of Core Knowledge Schools in the US is diverse—including public, charter, private and parochial schools in urban, suburban and rural locations. Independent nonprofit GreatSchools.org reports that more than 400 of these schools are preschools.

In his 2014 article published by Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Robert Pondiscio, the author of How the Other Half Learns in which he reviewed Success Academy, Pondiscio said if the Common Core State Standards Initiative was "properly understood and implemented", it would be a "delivery mechanism" for Hirsch's "ideas and work" and his Core Knowledge curriculum. Hirsch was not directly involved in developing the Common Core State Standards adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia, some education watchers credit E. D. Hirsch as having provided the "intellectual foundation" for the initiative. Pondiscio said that Politico had paired David Coleman—main author of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts—with Hirsch in eight place on their 2014 list of fifty "thinkers, doers and dreamers who really matter."

In 2011 a British version of The Core Knowledge Sequence was published online. The books began to be adapted for the UK, beginning with What Your Year 1 Child Needs to Know.

The Core Knowledge Foundation self-describes itself as non-partisan. Hirsch himself is an avowed Democrat who has described himself as "practically a socialist" In his 2010 article in the Claremont Review of Books, Terrence O. Moore cited Hirsch, who self-described as a "political liberal" had been "forced to become an educational conservative". Moore said that Hirsch's Left was the "Old Left". In The Making of Americans (2010), Hirsch said that, he was a "political liberal" who was "forced to become an educational conservative" after he had "recognized the relative inertness and stability of the shared background knowledge students need to master reading and writing." He said that the "democratic goal of high universal literacy would require schools to practice a large measure of educational traditionalism".

Michael Gove, who served as served as Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and then Secretary of State for Education under Prime Minister David Cameron from 2010 to 2014, oversaw major controversial education reforms. Gove admired Hirsch's theories of education, according to a 2012 article in The Guardian. Gove revised the national curriculum, which included "hard facts", allegedly influenced by Hirsch. In 2014, the Core Knowledge books were published in the U.K. by Civitas, which is widely characterised in the national news media as "right-of-centre". Standardized testing conducted by the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) had faced criticism since at least 2008, as a threat to social learning.

A 2010 article in the U.K.-based TES described Core Knowledge as a "kind of national curriculum" that outlines Hirsch's ideas on what "children should know in English language and literature, history, geography, maths, science, music, and art".

In 2009, he published The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, in which he makes the case that the true mission of the schools is to prepare citizens for participation in our democracy by embracing a common-core, knowledge-rich curriculum as opposed to what Hirsch claims to be the current content-free approach. He laments 60 years without a curriculum in US schools because of the anti-curriculum approach championed by John Dewey and other Progressives.

Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on education reform, described Hirsch's "curriculum for democracy" in 2009, as "content-rich pedagogy" that makes better citizens and smarter kids. Sterne said in 2013 that Hirsch was "the most important education reformer of the past half-century." Stern said that William Bennett, a prominent conservative who served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later US Secretary of Education, was an early proponent of Hirsch's views.

In his 2009 article, published online by Grove City College's Institute for Faith and Freedom, Jason R. Edwards—who teaches education and history at Grove City College—said that Hirsch has been criticized by the political left for being an "elitist" whose theories could result in a "rejection of toleration, pluralism, and relativism". On the political right, Hirsch has been accused of being "totalitarian, for his idea lends itself to turning over curriculum selection to federal authorities and thereby eliminating the time-honored American tradition of locally controlled schools".

In 2006, Hirsch published The Knowledge Deficit, in which he continued the argument made in Cultural Literacy. Disappointing results on reading tests, Hirsch argued, can be traced back to a knowledge deficit that keeps students from making sense of what they read.

In The Schools We Need Hirsch said that, "Higher-level skills critically depend upon the automatic mastery of repeated lower-level activities." In his 1999 book, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards, Alfie Kohn said that Hirsch's "starting with the basics" model "reflects a particular model of learning"—behaviorism—"which has lost credibility among experts in the field even as it retains a stranglehold on the popular consciousness".

A 1999 Baltimore Sun article said Hirsch's system had succeeded in "producing educated children" but ignited an "education controversy" which has been "very good for [Hirsch's] business". Hirsch said that he specifically designed a curriculum that would "place all children on common ground, sharing a common body of knowledge. That's one way to secure civil rights."

Harvard University professor Howard Gardner, who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, has been a long-time critic of Hirsch. Gardner described one of his own books, The Disciplined Mind (1999), as part of a "sustained dialectic" with E. D. Hirsch, and criticized Hirsch's curriculum as "at best superficial and at worst anti-intellectual". In 2007, Gardner accused Hirsch of having "swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education."

In his 1996 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, Hirsch was highly critical of the American education system, which he described as a "Thoughtworld" hostile to research-based findings and dissenting ideas.

In 1991, Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation put out What Your First Grader Needs to Know, the first volume in what is popularly known as "the Core Knowledge Series." Additional volumes followed, as did revised editions. The series now begins with What Your Preschooler Needs to Know and ends with What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know. The "series" books are based on the curriculum guidelines in the Core Knowledge Sequence. The books are used in Core Knowledge schools and other elementary schools. However, they have also been popular with homeschooling parents.

By 1990, the Core Knowledge had approximately 2,500 members and was largely self-supporting, although they continued to use grant money for large projects.

Hirsch established the non-profit Core Knowledge Foundation and serves as its director. The Foundation began publishing its Core Knowledge Sequence in the 1990s. This includes eight books as part of the Core Knowledge Grader Series of books. The series begins What Your Preschooler Needs to Know and ends with What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know. The series, which has been revised and updated over the years, have been particularly popular with parents who homeschool, as well as parents whose children attend Core Knowledge schools.

In 1988, Hirsch co-authored the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy with Joseph Kett and James Trefil. In 1989, Hirsch was the editor of A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. In 1991, Hirsch and his colleagues issued What Your First Grader Needs to Know, the first in the popular Core Knowledge "series."

By 1988, Hirsch was featured in the New York Times, as a "self-proclaimed crusade against noneducation" in his role as president of the Cultural Literacy Foundation which was headquartered in Charlottesville. The Foundation monitored the "spread of ignorance and illiteracy in the United States" and made "proposals for remedying it".

Hirsch is best known for his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which was a national best-seller and a catalyst for the standards movement in American education. Cultural Literacy included a list of approximately 5,000 "names, phrases, dates, and concepts every American should know" in order to be "culturally literate." Hirsch's arguments for cultural literacy and the contents of the list were controversial and widely debated in the late 1980s and early '90s.

In 1987, Hirsch's Cultural Literacy appeared. The book became a national bestseller, rising all the way to #2 on the New York Times Bestseller lists. Hirsch's book was often reviewed with and discussed in tandem with another education book published at roughly the same time, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. These two books convinced many readers that there were problems with American education. Hirsch's book "spurred a growing movement for prescriptive cultural literacy and standards in general." This resulted in a recommendation by the United States Department of Education that "cultural literacy should inform the content of the American educational system."

One early supporter of the Core Knowledge movement was Columbia University's Diane Ravitch, an education historian. Against the backdrop of the release of a scathing report on education in the United States—A Nation at Risk—Ravitch encouraged Hirsch to publish Cultural Literacy as a non-fiction book in 1987. The book included an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts" every American should know in order to be culturally literate.

In 1986, Hirsch established the non-profit Cultural Literacy Foundation, with a goal of developing a fact-rich core curriculum and piloting it in selected elementary schools.

In 1983, the Exxon Education Foundation provided support for further research. With this funding, Hirsch set up a team who began to compile lists of terms that "culturally literate" people know but young people and disadvantaged people may need to learn. This would become the appendix of his 1987 book, an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts," representing the "necessary minimum of American general knowledge".

In a 1981 presentation to the Modern Language Association, Hirsch introduced his theory on the connection between literacy in general and cultural literacy. A version of his MLA paper was published in 1983 as an article, "Cultural Literacy," in The American Scholar.

Since Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy" was published in the 1980s, his theories have often been embraced by political conservatives and criticized by liberals and progressives.

In the early 1970s Hirsch began working on the theory of writing and composition, publishing several articles and a book, The Philosophy of Composition (1977). The central concept in this book is the idea of "relative readability." One piece of writing is more readable, in terms of relative readability, than another if it conveys the same meaning but is easier to read and is read more quickly than the alternative passage. The Philosophy of Composition was widely reviewed and generated a lot of discussion in composition circles for several years, but Hirsch's work in this area is no longer widely discussed.

In the late 1970s, Hirsch and some colleagues at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on relative readability. Participants in the experiments were assigned either a well written passage or a poorly written (stylistically degraded) version of the same passage. Hirsch and his colleagues recorded reading time to determine whether the well written passages were in fact read more quickly, as they predicted they would be. They discovered that they were. However, they also discovered that there was another factor that was even more important than relative readability: if the students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled to read both the poorly written and the well written passage. This became particularly clear while Hirsch was running tests at a Virginia community college. The students at the community college did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War. Hirsch observed that these students lacked "cultural literacy." They had adequate decoding skills for reading, but they began to struggle when they lacked relevant background knowledge.

Before turning to education, Hirsch wrote on English literature and theory of interpretation (hermeneutics). His book Validity in Interpretation (1967) is considered an important contribution to hermeneutics. In it, Hirsch argues for intentionalism—the idea that the reader's goal should be to recover the author's meaning.

Hirsch was hired to teach English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1966. The next year, he published Validity in Interpretation (1967). This was his first book-length work on hermeneutics and theory of interpretation. However, it was not his first published work on the subject. He had previously published an article, "Objective Interpretation" (PMLA, 1960) and a review of the German edition of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (Review of Metaphysics, 1965). Both of these early pieces are reprinted as appendices in Validity in Interpretation.

In 1964, Hirsch published his second book, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. In this book Hirsch took issue with "systematic" critics of Blake's work, including Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Hirsch argued that Blake's ideas and outlook changed radically over time and that early works like The Songs of Innocence do not express the same worldview as later works like The Songs of Experience.

Hirsch continued to publish on hermeneutics and the concept of authorial intent in the late 1960s and early 1970's, and many of his articles from this period are collected in his second book on hermeneutics, The Aims of Interpretation (1975).

From 1956 to 1966, Hirsch taught in the English Department at Yale University. During this time most of his academic work concerned the English Romantic poets.

Hirsch was married to Gertrud Erna Winkelsen from 1956 and from 1958 to Mary Monteith Pope until her death in 2015. He is currently married to Natasha "Tasha" Tobin.

Hirsch has been awarded several fellowships and honors, including the Fulbright Fellowship (1955), the Morse Fellowship (1960), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1964), the Explicator Prize (1965), the NEA Fellowship (1970), the NEH Senior Fellowship (1971–71), the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities Fellowship (1973), the Princeton University Fellowship in the Humanities (1977), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship at Stanford University (1980–81).

In 1950, Hirsch graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York with a B.A. in English. After a brief stint in the naval reserves, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English literature at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He completed his doctorate in 1957.

Eric "E. D." Donald Hirsch Jr. /hɜːrʃ/ (born 1928) is an American educator, literary critic, and theorist of education. He is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was born on March 22, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee. His parents were Eric Donald Hirsch Sr. and Leah (Aschaffenburg) Hirsch. His father was a cotton broker who worked for Allenberg Cotton and was honored as "Cotton Man of the Year for 1956."