E.D. Hirsch is a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia that's gotten a lot of attention over the past 25 years or so for his work on what he calls "cultural literacy" in education. Hirsch's basic claim is that authors of fiction or non-fiction almost always assume their readers have a large amount of basic background knowledge of history and literature; basic facts which are rarely explicitly taught to them in school. An author of an advanced text will often assume his reader is familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, Achilles' Heel, or the Midas Touch. Even a reader with advanced knowledge of grammar and vocabulary can find such texts difficult to understand. I remember laughing when I took the ACT reading exam for the first time and discovered that I would be tested on a passage about Navajo code talkers during World War 2. The test was supposed to measure my reading comprehension but the large amount of embedded knowledge I had about the subject let me breeze through it in no time.
Since the 90's Hirsch has worked full time on education reform and has produced an extremely detailed set of guidelines proscribing what subjects need to be taught in which grades:
http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/480/CKFSequence_Rev.pdf
Needless to say, this is all very controversial. Education professors generally hate it, saying that it treats students as mere receptacles for facts and that it fails to build critical thinking skills. Other critics claim Hirsch's program is Euro centric and that it forces minority students to conform to the culture of the majority.
As you've probably guessed, I'm pretty strongly in Hirsch's camp. I think the two most common criticisms against his proposals are flawed: I could go on endlessly about why teaching critical thinking skills is a massive red herring but in a nutshell: 60 percent of 18 to 24 year old Americans cannot locate Iraq on a map, 57 percent of 17 year olds did not know the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900. I felt like crying in 11th grade when a girl, a very good student, asked me if World War II started when we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. I cannot believe that students with such an extreme ignorance of essential facts can be taught to think critically about a subject. Critical thinking is great, but it's something to be taught after students obtain basic knowledge about history and culture.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf
http://www.suite101.com/content/us-students-get-a-d-in-history-a46071
Secondly, although it's definitely true that Hirsch's curriculum has a European focus, that isn't necessarily a problem for minority groups. Hirsch is simply building his curriculum around the cultural knowledge demanded by American writers of all races. I haven't done the study, but I'd bet that if you surveyed the writing of famous African-American authors you'd find far, far more references to Biblical stories and Greco-Roman history than to African folktales or the history of the Songhai empire.
I agree with you on this one in part. I agree that it's ridiculous that students don't know much of the content Hirsch proposes, and I agree that they are capable of learning it at early stages of their education. I don't think teaching them in the way Hirsch suggests would be a massive detriment to the development of critical thinking skills; there are so many ways to incorporate upper level thinking into any curriculum, especially history and geography.
ReplyDeleteMy disagreement is in regards to the European focus. There is so much to gain in regional history from a regional perspective. As a fairly cliche example, I think there's tremendous value in learning early American history from the European/Western perspective as well as the Native American perspective. This can also foster the critical thinking skills, to present conflicting accounts. I don't think this critique can be dismissed so easily.
Good post -- I look forward to reading more of your posts.