THE KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT:

CLOSING THE SHOCKING EDUCATION GAP FOR AMERICAN CHILDREN

E. D. HIRSCH

New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Reading E.D. Hirsch’s books has always been somewhat like watching those television commercials for unspecified cure-all drugs: take the pill and find yourself dancing through an ethereal meadow of tall wheat, swaying flowers, and butterflies. You have no idea what the illness or the pharmaceutical is . . . but you remain entranced until nudged back to reality by a warning that side effects can include a string of new problems including dizziness and sudden death.

Anyone familiar with Hirsch’s educational prescriptions will find a similar, and typical, failure to attend to any complexity in real world maladies and the usual promotion of his own cure all prescription: the Core Knowledge curriculum. Hirsch diagnoses the root cause of what he deems widespread educational failure: anti-intellectual teacher education professors who both denigrate and withhold factual knowledge from future teachers and concurrently promote "naturalistic" or "formalistic" methods devoid of content. As a result, he charges, today’s classrooms are largely places characterized by meaningless attention to process and a total lack of real information (which might be quite a surprise to the millions of students struggling routinely with algebra, nominative and objective case, science projects, and Shakespeare). To outline a solution to the "shocking" problem he sees, Hirsch begins with sound cognitive science—as he did years ago in Cultural Literacy—and then identifies prescribes his own Core Knowledge curriculum as a magic bullet. "If [this book’s] recommendations are followed, reading scores will rise for all groups of children, and so will scores in math and science . . . . Equally important, social justice will be served" (21). Follow me through the meadow and insist on the standardized curriculum I endorse, Hirsch says, and all will be well—or at least incredibly better--in all schools everywhere.

Would that it were so. The cognitive science Hirsch outlines is both sound and familiar to the many educational researchers who have worked with it for decades, notably including countless education professors. His general attack on the professoriate is not only undocumented but unfounded, since teacher education programs have widely attended to cognitive science as the base of many methods courses, despite his claims to the contrary, and the need for students to have background information is widely stressed as a precondition to reading comprehension. The difficulty in reading Hirsch is that he mixes sound and substantive educational research with unwarranted claims, as when he characterizes teacher education programs universally as anti-intellectual while providing no evidence to support the charge. Thus, readers will want to keep an eye out for impossibly general assertions, including the claim that one approach will undoubtedly work for all children everywhere; to note that many of the methods Hirsch endorses (such as reading aloud to young children and teaching grammar explicitly) are common in the very mainstream classrooms he deplores; and to seek alternative discussions of what standardized test scores do and don’t mean, how standardized testing may force reluctant and resentful teachers into the mindless routines Hirsch rightfully criticizes (such as finding the main idea of an artificial passage), and how poverty affects classroom conditions and student motivation.

Any reader should be wary of the way Hirsch simply shrugs off complexities as he offers a simplistic solution to confounding educational problems that others have been working to remedy for decades. Unfortunately, this new book fails to respond to scholarly critiques of his earlier work and simply repeats the arguments that have already been seriously challenged. For a detailed, accessible and cogent analysis of weaknesses in Hirsch’s arguments as well as an overview of the broad political context which frame them, see Buras’ critique of his earlier work The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them; for a consideration of Hirsch’s views in terms of other contemporary issues including multicultural education, see Leistanya; for a shorter version of key criticisms, see Feinberg; and, for critique and a related alternative, see Provenzo.

Suggested readings: