Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1928–)

The Errant Path of Progressive Education

Hirsch contends that American education took a wrong turn early in the 20th century when Romantic or “progressive” child-centered ideas [Page 439]first began to make headway in educational thought and practice. He points to Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey as the leading philosophers who popularized progressive notions about the natural development of children and whose warnings against attempts to impose on young children content that was inappropriate for their age had gone awry.

According to Hirsch, Rousseau's belief that a child's intellectual and social skills would develop naturally without regard to the specific content of education is not only false but absolutely harmful. In The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996), Hirsch charged that as this “content neutral” conception of educational development gained widespread acceptance through the writings of John Dewey, William H. Kilpatrick, and other 20th-century progressive educators, it became the reigning mode of thought and recommended practice in American schools of education. Flowing from schools of education, the doctrines of progressive philosophy became pervasive in the developmental-oriented, content-anemic curriculum of American elementary schools.

The Road to Reform

To reform American education, says Hirsch, schools must adopt a curriculum rich in content based on essential “core knowledge” that every literate American should know and understand. Such a curriculum also should enable children to develop an expansive vocabulary as a key to depth of knowledge and the general ability to acquire new knowledge. “Learning builds on learning.”

At the heart of Hirsch's call for reform is his conviction that lack of attention to the content of education—“mainstream knowledge” or “cultural capital”—accounts in large measure for the lackluster performance of American students on standardized tests and international comparisons of achievement and is a key factor in perpetuating inequality in society. Although Hirsch's critics quickly pounced on his prescription for a curriculum based on essential academic knowledge as an elitist, neoconservative return to traditional “drill and kill” methodology, Hirsch, himself politically liberal, argues that shared knowledge or “cultural literacy” is “the oxygen of social intercourse.”

Without shared understandings and a common base of knowledge, he contends, there can be little hope of closing the gaps between the culturally literate and illiterate, the advantaged and the disadvantaged, the rich and the poor. He maintains that to close these gaps and to spread and share the cultural capital that is the only available ticket to full citizenship, agreement on and implementation of a common body of “core knowledge” should constitute the most urgent agenda for educational reform. Hirsch reasons that literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land. It excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes. While it is not always one's first culture, it should be everybody's second, existing as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighborhood, and region. Mastery of this body of core knowledge or intellectual capital should be the central component of an education designed to make people competent in the skills of life, regardless of race, class, or ethnicity.

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