Wolfe, Alan. "In Defence of a Common Culture." CHRISTIANITY TODAY February 4, 2010.

Hirsch, E. D. The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. E.D. Hirsch is a great American, a scholar who cares deeply about the youth of this country, what they are taught, and how likely they are to become engaged and thoughtful citizens. Hirsch describes himself as having enjoyed a "comfortable life as a conference-going literary theorist" before realizing that the failure of American schools to offer students actual content rather than faddish pedagogical innovations was not only turning young people into cultural illiterates but also was preventing those at the bottom of the ladder from improving their prospects in life through education. The founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and the author of the controversial Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), Hirsch was adopted by the Right early in the culture wars. But his actual political sympathies are more in line with Albert Shanker, the longterm leader of the New York City teacher's union (to whose memory the present book is dedicated). Hirsch's new book is called The Making of Americans, and while he describes it as both departing from and building upon his previous work, it does more of the latter than the former. Disappointingly there is little new to be learned; anyone who has already read Diane Ravich's Left Back will not glean more history and, indeed, anyone who has read Hirsch's previous books will pretty much know the contours of the argument. Still this book is valuable because it offers a clearly written, highly accessible, and brief statement of the issues that have guided Hirsch for the past two or three decades. Reading William Bennett from the Right or almost any product of a major school of education from the Left, one could be forgiven for thinking that the American school wars were a battle between progressive educators seeking to teach students about the wonders of race, ethnicity, and gender on the one hand and old-fashioned disciplinarians worried about the seductions of relativism and hedonism on the other. The most important contribution Hirsch makes to the way we think about educating our youth is to get us out of using terms such as Left and Right. All wars eventually end, even culture wars. It is time to take the ideology out of our educational battles, a task for which E.D. Hirsch is particularly suited. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/bc/2010/janfeb/defensecommonculture.html.

Stern, Sol. "E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy." CITY JOURNAL (Autumn 2009).

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same. Hirsch draws his insights from well outside traditional education scholarship. He started out studying chemistry at Cornell University but, mesmerized by Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, switched his major to English. Hirsch did his graduate studies at Yale, one of the citadels in the 1950s of the New Criticism, which argued that the intent of an author, the reader’s subjective response, and the text’s historical background were largely irrelevant to a critical analysis of the text itself. But by the time Hirsch wrote his doctoral dissertation—on Wordsworth—he was already breaking with the New Critics. “I came to see that the text alone is not enough,” Hirsch said to me recently at his Charlottesville, Virginia, home. “The unspoken—that is, relevant background knowledge—is absolutely crucial in reading a text.” Hirsch’s big work of literary theory in his early academic career, Validity in Interpretation, reflected this shift in thinking. After publishing several more well-received scholarly books and articles, he received an endowed professorship and became chairman of the English department at the University of Virginia. Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.” This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. Hirsch gave a lecture on the implications of his study at a Modern Language Association conference and then expanded the argument in a 1983 article, titled “Cultural Literacy,” in The American Scholar. The article caused a stir, not so much in the academy (and certainly not in the ed schools) as among public intellectuals. William Bennett, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, encouraged Hirsch to pursue his theme. Education historian Diane Ravitch urged him to get a book out fast and to call it Cultural Literacy as well. Hirsch heeded the advice, and in 1987, the book landed on the New York Times’s bestseller list, where it stayed for 26 weeks, resulting in a dramatic career change for the author. He kept researching and writing about how to improve the “cultural literacy” of young Americans and launched the Core Knowledge Foundation, which sought to create a knowledge-based curriculum for the nation’s elementary schools. A wide range of scholars assisted him in specifying the knowledge that children in grades K–8 needed to become proficient readers. For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects. By the late 1980s, Hirsch had all but abandoned academic literary studies and become a full-time education reformer. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. "The Religious Roots of 'Child-Centered' Education." CLASSICAL TEACHER (Summer 2007).

There are many disputes within the education field, but none so vituperative as the reading and math wars—the battles over how best to teach children to read and to solve arithmetic problems. These aren’t just disputes over instructional techniques--they are expressions of two distinct and opposing understandings of children’s nature and how children learn. The two sides are best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to education. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/hirsch.html.

Bauerlein, Mark. " The Remarkable Turn of E. D. Hirsch." CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM August 2, 2008.

Back in the 1960s, after publishing a book on Wordsworth, Hirsch published several essays in literary theory that became tokens of a certain outlook on interpretation. (It is noteworthy how many mid-century theorists wrote important essays and books on Romantic poets as they were crafting their ideas — Hirsch, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Northrop Frye, Earl Wasserman, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom.) His works “Objective Interpretation” and Validity in Interpretation were key statements in the initial phase of Theory (around the years 1965 to 1975), and they were taken as the significant position contrary to that of “undecidability,” “aporia,” and other poststructuralist and postmodern uncertainties. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/the-remarkable-turn-of-e-d-hirsch.