Ever since the 1987 publication of his blockbusterCultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E. D. Hirsch Jr. has been at the center of the debate surrounding what should constitute the school curriculum. Hirsch believes that it is not only possible but also vitally important to specify the "core knowledge" that all students should learn. This lasting body of knowledge, Hirsch writes, includes such topics as the basic principles of constitutional government, mathematics and language skills, important events of world history, and acknowledged masterpieces of art, music, and literature.
Under the approach Hirsch advocates, for example, kindergartners learn about the use of line and color in works such as Picasso'sLe Gourmet, 2nd graders study Cesar Chavez and Susan B. Anthony, 4th graders learn about electricity, and 6th graders read The Iliad and The Odyssey. Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a grade-by grade core knowledge sequence for kindergarten through grade 8; to date, more than 800 schools have adopted a program based on the concept. Next on his agenda is to expand the core knowledge sequence to include preschool—a move that is bound to provoke more controversy.
You certainly weren't the first person to say that all students should experience a common curriculum, but you're one of the few who spelled it out in such detail. Why is it so important to spell it out?
If you don't have specificity, you can't have commonality. Leaving things vague, which is what most curriculum documents do, prevents us from making sure that children experience some essential common content, and it also produces these gaps and repetitions as children move through the grades. And that perpetuates inequities because disadvantaged students don't then have access to the vital knowledge that other students do.
The other reason for being specific is that it makes the content of the curriculum open to view. It can be debated and talked over in a democratic way.
Why is there reluctance to be explicit about the content that all students should learn?
As soon as you name names, you get attacked! And educators, particularly superintendents and principals, are reluctant to be attacked. To be specific is to be controversial instantly, because when you include something in the curriculum, not only might somebody object to what you include, but also someone else might object to what you exclude.
So specificity is politically dangerous for people who are in politically vulnerable situations. But a second reason is that being explicit about content is seen as going against the tradition of local autonomy.
Many educators argue that the professional teacher in his or her classroom knows the individual needs of every student in that classroom, which vary quite a bit, and that the circumstances in North Dakota are necessarily different from those in Washington, D.C.
There's obviously some virtue in that comment. That's one of the reasons that in our initiative, we plan that about 50 percent of the curriculum be devoted to core knowledge activities, with the other 50 percent available to meet the priorities of local teachers or administrators.
Having said that, though, I believe that the goal of meeting students' individual needs in the classroom has been greatly misused in American educational theory. The fact is that if you have 25 kids in the classroom, and you are giving individual attention to one, you're not giving individual attention, most of the time, to 24. Most class time should therefore be spent in effective whole-class instruction if all children are truly to get individual attention. Further, regardless of individual temperament, all children have certain common needs. All children should learn how to read. All children should learn how to do math. So where does the individuality come in, in this whole business of learning arithmetic and learning to read?
Now, there are going to be very extreme cases, but there we're talking about a very small percentage of students. For the vast majority of students, it makes sense to establish grade-by-grade standards, rather than to leave everything up to each school and each teacher. And the reason we know that is that highly successful countries, both in Asia and in Europe, have clear standards for each grade, and they make them work for all students. So it may be "un-American," but having clear standards is very possible—and very democratic.
A recent article in the New York Times titled "Teachers Scrap Lesson Plan to Grapple with Starr Report" mentions how teachers put aside Wordsworth, Keats, and Austen to teach about this important current event. Does that sort of thing give you a pause?
On the contrary, I'm very much for that. The teachers wove it into their lesson plans, and that's what good teachers do. You can't have canned lesson plans. You need to start where the students are and capture their interest. But you also have to have a clear idea of where you're going with the lesson once you capture their interest. And I remember that the article mentioned that teachers related the events to literture, to The Scarlet Letter and so on. So there was some focused discussion of literary meaning, and the teacher used the current event as the starting-off place. That seems to me quite responsible teaching, but, I should also point out, it's clearly at the high school level. And our work with Core Knowledge focuses on elementary.
Your approach has been criticized as overemphasizing discrete facts, when many educators feel that the more important goal should be to teach students the skills to know how to find facts.
But how do you look up facts unless you know where to look? I had a letter from a reference librarian who was wringing his hands because the students coming into his library didn't even know where to begin to look because they lacked the fundamental background information. So though it's true that information is increasing exponentially, arithmetic has not changed very much. The basic facts of American history, at least the dates when the wars were fought, have not changed at all. When people talk of the rapid changes and developments, they're mostly thinking of technology or science, and, of course, modern, current history is changing. Every day brings new history, but that doesn't change the Civil War and it doesn't change arithmetic. The core of what is taught in elementary school and the core of what is fundamental to our culture hasn't changed much in a hundred years.
How did it happen that schools began using the Core Knowledge Program?
The development of Core Knowledge schools has been pretty much outside my control; it's a grassroots movement. We did provide guidance and materials so that schools that wanted to explore the ideas would have a place to begin. We developed at length a grade-by-grade core program. Then we produced a series of resource books that parents and teachers could use if they wanted to do this.
But the actual work in the schools—the choice by schools that they wanted to do this—we haven't controlled at all. And it's hard for us just to keep track, but at last count there were more than 800 Core Knowledge schools in 44 states.
Do you mean they've adopted the program schoolwide?
Yes. Each school has agreed to adopt this program as a school so that every 2nd grade classroom, for example, will be teaching this core in addition to whatever else the teacher wants to teach. We see comprehensive change in the way teachers work as colleagues and the way they react to parents and the way parents connect with the school. But comprehensive reform is not something that we've been propagandizing for. The Core Knowledge movement has been a teacher movement and a parent movement. Sometimes a superintendent or a principal has been the leader, but there's often resistance from administrators in the school or in the district to do something that's so radical. Because, again, as soon as you get very specific about content, you open yourself to great criticism.
Can you talk about the evaluative data on schools' using Core Knowledge? Have you gotten student test scores or other measures of effects?
Yes. The data we've analyzed is very promising. Take, for example, Calvert County, Maryland, which went districtwide with Core Knowledge. Before using the program, it ranked 12th in the state, and the next year, it was 6th, and the following year, it was 3rd. Clearly, the coherence of what was done in the district was helping children perform a lot better.
The data most gratifying to me are the data on predicted improvement of disadvantaged students. A couple of districts have compared how well disadvantaged students in Core Knowledge schools did with the achievements of similar students in other schools. And in both cases, the performance of the disadvantaged kids in the Core Knowledge school, is off the charts—much higher than the performance of students in other schools with a similar demographic base. To me, that was predictable, but it's very gratifying. I'm less worried about the suburbs than I am about the inner city. If teachers in the inner city can actually deliver this kind of curriculum, if they decide they want to do it, their children will gain, most significantly in reading comprehension and learning ability.
When your book Cultural Literacy was published, it caused a sensation, in part because you dared to name "what every American needs to know." Now we have national standards in almost every subject. What's your perspective on the national standards?
Well, I don't disapprove of them, for heaven's sake; as far as I can see, the standards in the sciences and in social studies and in math seemed very good. Of course, there are great debates over these issues; for example, there's a tremendous debate over math. But the national standards I've seen are quite consistent with the Core Knowledge curriculum, so they don't cause me any concern.
A flaw I do see is that most standards are described in four-year increments (what students can do at the end of 4th grade, 8th grade, 12th grade). That's not a practical approach because it doesn't solve the problem of gaps and repetitions for the individual child who changes teachers each year. The academic year is the unit of time during which the same child and the same teacher are generally together, so I think the standards should recognize that.
I'm a little surprised to find you a supporter of the standards documents because a lot of people have criticized them for having the same faults you've decried; they're too "squishy," they're vague statements about some desirable things for kids to be doing.
Well, it depends on what standards you're talking about.
How about the standards in English?
Oh, English! I would hardly call what they published standards. It doesn't even mention any literary works. There aren't even works of Shakespeare as far as I can recall. I think the standards in English were a grave disappointment, and the government thought so, too, which is why they withdrew their funding. You can't make any kind of blanket statement about standards; it depends upon which ones you're talking about. For example, I admire the standards in civics, which are very specific and widely accepted.
What's next on your agenda in terms of a future work?
Preschool. We need to put out a preschool book. Already a large number of Core Knowledge preschools exist. There's a great deal of excitement about this effort because it is very carefully researched and also very specific. And, of course, this is going to upset the individualistic, developmentally oriented people, who will see its pre-academic component as an evil thing. But I hope theirs isn't the majority view, because it's very clear that a strong preschool program is the road to social justice.
