E.D. Hirsch

E.D. Hirsch – Professor emeritus of education and humanities University of Virginia

Hirsch is an advocate of the core knowledge curriculum. Hirsch’s ideas are based around the notion that students are entitled to knowledge and that the curriculum should be based around an idea of ‘minimal content’ that students should be required to know. This means named knowledge content, for example, specified literary texts in English. This manifests itself as list of facts, terms and knowledge points that all students should know and should be able to recall readily from memory. Hirsch is critical of skills like critical thinking being defined as ‘higher order’ than knowledge. He argues that to think critically, you must first have a deep knowledge of a subject. Hirsch states that skills are actually procedural knowledge, that come from a rich understanding of substantive knowledge that has been learnt first. The more you know, the deeper your critical thinking. He also argues that students with a wide knowledge base will be able to decode text and be a more fluent reader, than one that has been taught generic skills.

Hirsch sees education as a tool of social justice. Hirsch is critical of allowing students (or novices) to discover knowledge using the internet. He says that ‘You cannot become an instant expert. Google rewards those who already have knowledge’. Hirsch believes that schools have a moral responsibility to teach a knowledge driven curriculum because we can’t rely on the ‘invisible hand’ to give students that knowledge through chance.

Hirsch believes in assessment that checks whether curriculum content and knowledge has been learnt and that assessments should be explicitly based on the curriculum being taught.

Critics have argued against E D Hirsch because they feel he has reduced learning to a checklist of facts. He has also been criticised because by prescribing what knowledge is taught, it can be argued that the person who selects that knowledge is all powerful and that this preserves the status quo and does not achieve the aims that Hirsch set out, namely that education is a tool of social justice.