Hirsch, E.D., Jr. 1928-

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HIRSCH, E.D., Jr. 1928-

(Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born March 22, 1928, in Memphis, TN; son of Eric Donald (a businessperson) and Leah (Aschaffenburg) Hirsch; married Mary Pope, 1958; children: John, Frederick, Elizabeth. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1950; Yale University, M.A., 1955, Ph.D., 1957.

ADDRESSES: Home—2006 Pine Top Rd., Charlottesville, VA 22903. Office—University of Virginia, Curry School of Education, P.O. Box 400261, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4261. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor, 1956–60, assistant professor, 1960–63, associate professor of English, 1963–66; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, professor, 1966–72, William R. Kenan Professor of English, 1973–84, chair of English department, 1968–71, 1981–82, director of composition, 1971–, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English, 1989–. Member of faculty, Northwestern University, School of Criticism and Theory, summer, 1981; Bateson Lecturer, Oxford University, 1983. New York Regent's Competency Tests in Writing, national advisory council member, 1979; Coalition for Core Curriculum, president, 1989; Cultural Literacy Foundation, trustee, founder and president 1986–; U.S. Department of Education, Research Advisory Board member. Albert Shanker Institute, director, 1997. Military service: U.S. Naval Reserve, 1950–54, active duty, 1950–52.

MEMBER: International Academy of Education, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Modern Language Association of America, American Academy of Teachers, Keats-Shelley Association, Byron Society, American Rhododendron Society, Royal Academy of Science, Literature, and Arts.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright fellow, 1955; Morse fellow, 1960–61; Guggenheim fellow, 1964–65; Explicator (magazine) Prize, 1964, for Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake; National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellow, 1971–72, 1980–81; Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities fellow, 1973, 1974; Princeton University Council of the Humanities fellow, 1976; Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellow, 1980–81; Australian National University Humanities Research Centre fellow, 1982; Biennial Quest Award, American Federation of Teachers, 1997; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, 2005; honorary degrees from Rollins College, Marieta College, Rhodes College, and Williams College.

WRITINGS:

Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1960.

Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1964, second edition, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1975.

Validity in Interpretation, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1967.

The Aims of Interpretation, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1976.

The Philosophy of Composition, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1977.

Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

(With Joseph Kett and James Trefil) The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1988, third edition published as The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 2002

(Editor) A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989, third edition published as The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Your Child Needs to Know, 2004.

The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with John Holdren) Books to Build On: A Grade-by-Grade Resource Guide for Parents and Teachers, Delta (New York, NY), 1996.

The Knowledge Deficit: Creating a Reading Revolution for a New Generation of American Achievers, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006.

Author of introduction to The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, Precedent, 1987. Contributor to books, including From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Harold Bloom and Frederick W. Hilles, Oxford University Press, 1965; History as a Tool in Critical Interpretation: A Symposium, edited by Thomas F. Rugh and Erin R. Silva, Brigham Young University Press, 1978; and What Is Literature?, edited by Paul Hernadi, Indiana University Press, 1978. Contributor of essays and articles to periodicals, including American Educator, Times Literary Supplement, Critical Inquiry, College English, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Scholar.

EDITOR; "CORE KNOWLEDGE" SERIES

What Your First Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1991, revised edition, 1997

What Your Second Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Second-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1991, revised edition, 1998

What Your Third Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Third-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992, revised edition, 2001

What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1992, revised edition, 2004

What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fifth-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993, revised edition, 2005

What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Sixth-Grade Education, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1993.

(With John Holdren) What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know: Preparing Your Child for a Lifetime of Learning, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Souzanne A. Wright) Core Knowledge: Grade K, Kindergarten, Core Knowledge Foundation (Charlottesville, VA), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Author, educator, and educational reformer E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is a writer deeply concerned with the education and cultural literacy of children and adults in America. After spending a quarter of a century publishing works that have had a "significant impact on recent American literary criticism and theory," according to an essayist in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Hirsch published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, a book that hit the bestseller lists and raised a storm of controversy. Hirsch argues in the book that many Americans are ignorant of the shared terms and concepts of their society, and that this renders them incapable of participating fully in that society. Cultural Literacy brought Hirsch to the attention of a wide reading audience and pushed him into founding the Cultural Literacy Foundation, an organization that promotes the teaching of a shared core of knowledge in the nation's schools.

Cultural Literacy begins with a recitation of facts illustrating the degree to which contemporary students are ill informed. Hirsch quotes studies showing that the majority of high school students do not know when the American Civil War took place, half cannot identify Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin, three-fourths do not recognize Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau, and many are unaware of when Christopher Columbus discovered America. High school students' knowledge of science, geography, the arts, and other subjects is also weak. Such a lack of basic information renders much of what these students read meaningless. They are not illiterate, but they are unable to identify people and places discussed in what they read, and are baffled by historic, scientific, and literary terms or allusions. "That so many people should be stumbling around in this kind of fog," wrote John Gross in the New York Times, "is an obvious cause for concern. It implies a coarsening in the quality of life, and a drying-up of invaluable common traditions. It makes it harder for us to communicate with one another. For the children of the poor and disadvantaged, it represents a formidable barrier to progress." James W. Tuttleton, writing in Commentary, explained, "Most Americans can make out the words. The literacy we need, according to Hirsch, is cultural literacy."

As a means of identifying some of the information that cultural illiterates lack, Hirsch includes a sixty-three-page list of five thousand names, terms, and phrases he considers to be essential to cultural literacy. Compiled with the assistance of two academic colleagues—historian Joseph Kett and physicist James Trefil—the list includes such varied items as "absolute zero," "flapper," "Sherlock Holmes," "critical mass," and "empiricism." A complete and thorough knowledge of each item is not needed, Hirsch explains. To understand a text a reader needs schemata, thumbnail explanations of these terms. Newsweek contributor David Gates defined schemata as "simple, superficial ideas suggested by words." Studies show that these are enough to allow a literate person to comprehend newspapers, books, and other media, and more importantly, to participate in his/her society. According to Tuttleton, Hirsch "points out that the culturally illiterate—and the same goes for those not having a command of standard English—can exercise no effect on discourse concerning social policy." As Hirsch writes in the book, "We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else."

Not all critics had favorable things to say about Cultural Literacy. Some claimed that the book calls for a return to "teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later," as Stefan Kanfer noted in Time. The list of needed cultural information has prompted "accusations of elitism," Charles Trueheart reported in the Washington Post. Nation contributor Robert Pattison stated that "a culture index poses a fundamental political question: How far are the wishes of the people to be consulted in determining the nature of culture itself?" But even harsh critics admit that the book raises some serious questions about the failure of American education.

In The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, written with Joseph Kett and James Trefil, Hirsch provides definitions of the items listed in his earlier book, along with the definitions of many other terms. "The dictionary is more ambitious and really more important," Hirsch told Trueheart in the Washington Post, "because it will suggest to people who are outsiders in the literate culture, 'What do these characters really know that I'm being excluded from?'" The book is arranged into twenty-three sections that cover the major categories of knowledge, providing definitions of hundreds of terms, ideas, events, and names.

The revised edition, published in 2003 as The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, provides more than seven thousand entries covering twenty-three broad sections of knowledge, including fine arts; physical, earth, and life sciences; the Bible; mythology and folklore; technology; and world and American history. The entries include not only definitions but also cultural associations, concisely placing the objects and concepts into the overall cultural context. Library Journal reviewer Manya S. Chylinski remarked, "All that need be said about this first-rate reference is that it is well written, well researched, and well worth the money." A Publishers Weekly contributor called it "entertaining, snappily written, extremely handy, and reasonably inclusive," though tending somewhat toward the conservative.

For younger readers, Hirsch created A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know and its revised edition, The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Your Child Needs to Know, published in 2004. The book contains more than three thousand terms and definitions, arranged by subject and geared for students in grades one through six. The book focuses on topics more likely to be taught in an elementary school setting and thus more likely to be of interest to grade-school students. Diane C. Donovan, writing in the MBR Bookwatch, called the work an "excellent reference encouraging answers to common school questions and homework."

Many of Hirsch's ideas about cultural literacy are derived from his years as a literary critic, during which time he has shown "an enduring concern for types and for the typicality of expressive and interpretive behavior," according to Caraher. As a critic, Hirsch does not isolate a text from its author. Rather, he focuses his attention on the author's worldview, knowledge, and cultural situation—a critic must enter into the author's perceptual framework. Caraher found that Hirsch's "most singular contribution to modern American criticism and theory … might very well be his persistent iteration of the philosophical inevitability and the heuristic power of typology."

Hirsch's Cultural Literacy Foundation aims at modifying the present grade-school curriculum, focusing more on the necessary background information that will enable students to have a thorough foundation of knowledge. The Cultural Literacy Foundation issues lists and tests for third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth grade students. Hirsch once told CA: "The Foundation's fundamental aim is to enhance literacy, and to do it by affecting the school curriculum, particularly in the very early grades."

Hirsch further summarized: "One theme is consistent: language is saying more than appears on the page, or in the sounds we make. The actual words are able to convey meaning only because of all sorts of implications that are not said. The reader must bring those meanings to the words by virtue of background knowledge. That principle, which is one that dates way back to the 1950s and early '60s in my work, forms a principle of continuity with my work on literacy."

With The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, Hirsch returns to the topic of American education. In this book he considers the question of why American public schools are so bad. His answer is that the prevailing philosophy behind the American educational establishment for the greater part of the twentieth century is to blame. Traced to the romantic movement, progressivism is responsible for the failings of the American educational system. This progressive tradition, the author explains, favors giving the child learning tools rather than concrete information, and it considers the child's natural development, not the rigidity of the classroom, to be the primary guide for education. Rejecting this approach, Hirsch argues for a more conservative educational policy, emphasizing the importance of factual knowledge as well as a formal classroom setting to a child's education. The author dismisses school voucher programs as a potential solution to the country's educational problems and instead calls for a national standardized curriculum. Commenting on the book in the Public Interest, Jerome J. Hanus described its goals: "The book is aimed at educators and opinion leaders in the hope that a grassroots movement will ensue demanding the rejection of current educational myths and the adoption of rational policies."

Critical reception to The Schools We Need has been generally favorable. Reviewing the work in the Washington Monthly, Dante Ramos, although judging Hirsch "a bit overzealous" in his argument regarding factual knowledge and noting his failure to consider alternative explanations for the nation's educational woes, found that "his analysis is fascinating, and his conclusions are often compelling." Commentary writer Wilfred M. McClay viewed the author's relative lack of comment on such phenomena as charter schools and school choice as "puzzling," yet he asserted that Hirsch "places the blame squarely on the false and pernicious ideas of American educationists themselves. The Schools We Need is a tour de force of unsparing critique." Even though Hanus himself favors a voucher system, he declared, "One can only say amen to Hirsch's efforts; he has indeed made an inestimable contribution to our understanding by summarizing the extant research data on the key educational controversies." Sara Mosle contended in the New York Times Book Review that "Mr. Hirsch is … refreshingly unpolemical. His book presents a sophisticated, scholarly, and often compelling argument and it deserves serious consideration, whatever one's political predilections."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 67: Modern American Critics since 1955, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Hirsch, E.D., Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1980.

Ray, William, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 1984.

PERIODICALS

America, September 21, 1996, Patrick H. Samway, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 33.

Atlantic, December, 1989, Neil Postman, review of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, p. 119.

Booklist, September 15, 1996, Ray Olson, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 188; February 1, 1997, "Books to Build On: A Grade-by-Grade Resource Guide for Parents and Teachers," review of the Core Knowledge Series, p. 962; May 15, 2003, review of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. 1702.

Book Report, March-April, 1997, Marilyn Makowski, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 55.

Commentary, July, 1987, James W. Tuttleton, "Literacy at the Barricades," review of Cultural Literacy, p. 45; January, 1997, Wilfred M. McClay, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 70.

ETC: A Review of General Semantics, spring, 1998, Martin H. Levinson, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 113.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, May, 1997, Chester E. Finn, Jr., review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 33.

Forbes, November 16, 1998, Jennifer Roback Morse, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 72.

Journal of Reading, May, 1988, Ronald A. Jobe, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 771.

Library Journal, May 15, 1996, Barbara Mann, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 98; October 1, 1996, Jessica George, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 96; March 15, 1998, Don Wismer, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 109; November 1, 2002, Manya S. Chylinski, review of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. 78.

MBR Bookwatch, August, 2005, Diane C. Donovan, review of The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Your Child Needs to Know.

NASSP Bulletin, May, 1997, Anne Wescott, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 121.

Nation, May 30, 1987, Robert Pattison, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 710.

Newsweek, April 20, 1987, David Gates, "A Dunce Cap for America; What We Don't Know, Why We Don't Know It," review of Cultural Literacy, p. 72.

New York Times, April 17, 1987, John Gross, review of Cultural Literacy, p. C27; November 10, 2002, Peter Temes, review of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. ED35.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1987, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 12; December 17, 1989, Joseph Shenker, review of A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know, p. 22; November 14, 1993, John Allen Paulos, review of What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fifth-Grade Education, p. 69; September 29, 1996, Sara Mosle, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 14; November 17, 2002, Judith Shulevitz, "Hirsch vs. Hirsch," review of Cultural Literacy, p. 63.

Public Interest, winter, 1997, Jerome J. Hanus, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 124.

Publishers Weekly, July 15, 1996, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 65; September 30, 2002, review of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. 59.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2996, Alexander Mamak, "A Call to Face Facts in School," review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. 2.

Time, July 20, 1987, Stefan Kanfer, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 72.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1988, review of Cultural Literacy, p. 23.

Vogue, September, 1996, Tad Friend, review of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. 433.

Washington Monthly, March, 1997, Dante Ramos, review of The Schools We Need and why We Don't Have Them, p. 54.

Washington Post, April 20, 1987, Charles Trueheart, review of Cultural Literacy; October 27, 1996, Robert O'Harrow, review of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, p. ER12.

Wilson Library Bulletin, January, 1990, James Rettig, review of A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, p. 128.