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Common knowledge
E.D. Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit receives a thoughtful appraisal from Albert Fernandez in the current issue of Common Review. Hirsch's book argues that declining literacy rates in this country are not going to be effectively reversed until schools stop regarding reading as an isolated skill and begin realizing that readers must bring a substantial amount of core knowledge with them if they are to make sense of what they read.
In The Knowledge Deficit, E. D. Hirsch Jr. recounts this experiment and draws on the work of reading researchers and theorists to argue that "background knowledge," knowledge not explicitly presented in a text, is essential to reading comprehension. Hirsch advances his case at a time when there is growing concern about the poor reading proficiency of American students compared to their international peers. What is worse, Hirsch points out, is that the longer these students are in school, the lower they drop--to a depressing 15th out of 27 countries by the tenth grade. The scores get worse after the early grades when students are increasingly tested for comprehension and not just for "decoding," the ability to translate written marks into words."We need to see the reading comprehension problem," Hirsch writes, "for what it primarily is--a knowledge problem." Schooling, according to Hirsch, must supply our students with the broad knowledge--much less of baseball than of history, literature, science, and other traditional subjects--that is requisite for reading. This broad knowledge of words and of the world is also what standardized reading tests in fact test for, Hirsch says. These typically consist of passages on a variety of topics, undisclosed until testing time, for which only a good general education can prepare the student. In or out of the exam room or the research lab, there is no such thing as reading comprehension without prior knowledge of a text's vocabulary (90 percent of it is the estimated minimum) and its references, and no such thing as effective education without imparting to students a wide range of specific knowledge.
For Hirsch, literacy is always also cultural literacy. The path to a better educated public is thus one that is paved not simply with skills, but also with information. Our schools have essentially abandoned content, he argues -- and so have our attempts to get students back on track: "NCLB has led states to mandate at least 90 minutes of reading instruction every school day, but, as Hirsch explains, the additional time spent on reading techniques has been at the expense of classes in geography, history and the like. Thus a major consequence of the law has been to minimize school time spent on subject matter." The solution, for Hirsch, is a core curriculum that complements the existing emphasis on skills with a new (or recovered) emphasis on knowledge.
Fernandez parses how we came to be so hostile to the concept of imparting knowledge in schools, tracing both Hirsch's attribution of the problem to John Dewey's progressive ideas about education (in which rote and drill and authoritative teaching are anathema to the ideal classroom) and Hirsch's own occasional misattributions (if American classrooms are overly indebted to Dewey--or to a watered-down version of Dewey--they also too often treat reading very much as a rote skill disconnected from the contexts that make it meaningful).
And Fernandez also dismantles the usual ways of dismissing arguments such as Hirsch's, which tend to be discounted on the basis of their putative ethnocentricity and insensitivity to "different ways of knowing." Hirsch's core knowledge sequence, Fernandez notes, is resolutely and necessarily multicultural:
Hirsch's multicultural curriculum follows logically from his educational principles. Cultural literacy, in contemporary culture at least, requires that readers know about groups and persons traditionally confined to history's marginalia. But this rationale is different from the more political one that has informed multicultural studies over the past few decades: that we have an obligation to bolster the standing and self-perception of various suppressed or marginalized "identitites." For Hirsch, the way to really help minority students is not through identity politics but rather through greater integration into the existing culture. Teaching that is focused on correcting the knowledge deficit, Hirsch argues, would be especially beneficial to disadvantaged children
That claim has been backed up by studies of minority French students, whose achievement gap narrowed substantially when they were taught according to the principles of knowledge-intensive education.
Work such as Hirsch's is not only of terrific importance for our understanding of how American K-12 education should be reformed; it also has serious implications for debates about higher education. Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education sidestepped the pressing problem of what is being taught in our colleges and universities--as if it is possible to talk meaningfully about improving higher education in this country without talking about what undergraduates do and do not learn. But we can't sidestep that question. We need to look hard at the way so many schools in this country have excised a coherent concept of content from their general requirements and even, in many cases, from their major requirements. And we need to take seriously the idea that a core curriculum may be just as crucial for college students as it is for younger ones.
To read more, see ACTA's reports, The Hollow Core, Becoming an Educated Person, and Losing America's Memory.
Posted by acta online at January 28, 2007 09:16 AM
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