Turning Education on Its Head

The Educational Common Sense of E.D. Hirsch

The most recent edition of City Journal as an extensive article on educational reformer, E. D. Hirsch. This gentleman's prescriptions have been adopted over a number of years by the education system in the state of Massachusetts, resulting in a salutary rise in educational standards throughout that state.

We have posted several times on how educational theorists and government education systems have become deeply influenced by post-modern philosophical theory, coupled with a relentless drive to subvert and pervert God's established order in creation. Demand rights theories have been applied to children, resulting in a consensus amongst avant-guard educational theorists and bureaucrats to the effect that children are mini-adults, and must be treated as adults from the time they take their first breath (they are entitled to it, don't you know).

The Scriptures, however, reveal that God has created the world with hierarchical structures of superiors and inferiors.

The Fifth Commandment makes clear that children are inferiors, in the sense of being commanded to obey and honour their parents. Modern post-Enlightenment man believes he knows better, insisting that children are the sociological and legal equal of adults and are to be treated as such. This has meant an excessive emphasis has been placed on the child learning and discovering for himself, rather than being taught by a superior. As a consequence, government education systems have increasingly tended towards contentless education. The upshot: more and more illiterate graduates coming out of government schools.

E. D. Hirsch is not, to our knowledge, a Christian. He is just a common-sense academic who has managed to avoid or evade being swept up with the avant-guard establishment. Hirsch's specialist academic field was literature. Eventually he ended up as Chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s [University of Virginia] admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students.

Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

In other words, Hirsch realised that the dominant cause of poor English skills was a lack of background knowledge in related humanities. This led him to create a knowledge based curriculum for primary and intermediate schools, called the Core Knowledge Curriculum.

For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Hirsch was quickly reviled by the educational establishment. His book Cultural Literacy

came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist.

The idea that there might be an authoritative corpus of knowledge which had to be transmitted to children was an anathema to the avant-guard. By the mid 1980's, the avant-guard had become the educational establishment. Their triumph was virtually complete.

Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” In my children’s elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching.

Hirsch began systematically to skewer these stupid ideas (which still dominate the New Zealand government education system to this day).

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

In 1993 the State of Massachusetts quixotically decided that it would follow Hirsch's advice and set knowledge based standards in its curricula for each school year. The result? Rapidly rising educational achievements by students in the Massachusetts school system.

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.

It is a salutary achievement. But not unexpected. Strange things happen when you cast of the shackles of a spurious ideology and deal with the world as God has created and established it. Part of that establishment is accepting the superiority of adults (and their delegates, the teachers) over children and their consequent responsibility to teach and impart truth and knowledge to the next generation.