E. D. Hirsch Jr.

b. 1928 Specialist

A poetry scholar who found that background knowledge is what reading takes

Portrait of E. D. Hirsch Jr. — Policy Exchange — 2015 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

E. D. Hirsch Jr. grew up in Memphis, the son of a cotton broker, and moved through a string of schools — public schools, a New Orleans day school, an Illinois boarding school — before Cornell and then a Yale PhD in English literature. He taught the Romantic poets at Yale for a decade, then moved to the University of Virginia in 1966 and built an early reputation as a literary theorist, arguing in his 1967 book Validity in Interpretation that a text means what its author meant, a position that put him against the interpretive fashions taking over English departments at the time. Nothing in that early career suggested he would end up better known for grade-school curriculum than for Romantic poetry.

The turn came in the late 1970s, when Hirsch ran readability experiments at a Virginia community college and found that students could sound out sentences about Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant perfectly well and still not understand them, for lack of any background knowledge to hang the words on. He built that observation into Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, published in 1987 with an appended list of roughly 5,000 names, dates and phrases he argued literate Americans needed to share, and the book reached number two on the bestseller list and helped launch the standards movement in American schooling. He had founded the nonprofit that became the Core Knowledge Foundation the year before, and by the mid-2010s its content-specific curriculum was in use in well over a thousand schools across 46 states.

Hirsch calls himself a Democrat and, by his own description, 'practically a socialist,' which makes the label attached to his life's work — educational conservative — sit uneasily with his own politics; he says the data on background knowledge simply forced the position on him. The book that made his name got hit from both directions: Howard Gardner called the underlying curriculum 'at best superficial and at worst anti-intellectual,' a charge from the educational left Hirsch has spent decades answering, while critics on the right have accused the same project of angling toward federal control of what gets taught. He kept revising the argument rather than retreating from it, publishing The Knowledge Deficit in 2006 and How to Educate a Citizen in 2020, each restating the same core claim in a different political climate.

Hirsch remains active past 95, living in Charlottesville and still directing the Core Knowledge Foundation he built from a single reading experiment. The fight he started over what schools owe students by way of shared background knowledge has outlasted several waves of education reform built on other premises, and versions of his content-sequenced approach now sit inside curricula well beyond the schools that formally license the Core Knowledge name — an argument that has not been settled so much as absorbed, part by part, into how American reading instruction gets built.

Lifespan

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E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Validity in Interpretation book
Argued that a text means what its author meant 1967
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know book
Reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list 1987
Core Knowledge Sequence other
Grade-by-grade curriculum, in use in schools across 46 states by 2015 1991
The Knowledge Deficit book
Restated the background-knowledge argument for a new reform era 2006
How to Educate a Citizen book
Argued shared knowledge is necessary to hold a democracy together 2020