E. D. Hirsch
Based on Wikipedia: E. D. Hirsch
In the 1970s, a University of Virginia professor made a disturbing discovery. He was running reading experiments at a community college when he realized his students couldn't make sense of a passage about the American Civil War. The problem wasn't that they couldn't decode the words on the page. They could sound out every syllable just fine. The problem was far more fundamental: they had never heard of Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee.
These were students raised in Virginia—the state where much of the Civil War was actually fought, where battlefields dot the landscape like historical monuments. And they didn't know the names of the two most important generals.
That professor was E. D. Hirsch, and that moment of dismay would eventually reshape the American education debate for decades to come.
The Accidental Education Reformer
Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1928. His father was a cotton broker—successful enough to be named "Cotton Man of the Year" in 1956—and young Hirsch received a privileged education, moving through Memphis public schools, then private day schools in Memphis and New Orleans, before finishing at a boarding school in Illinois.
He graduated from Cornell University in 1950 with a degree in English, did a brief stint in the naval reserves, then headed to Yale for his doctorate in English literature. By 1956, he was teaching in Yale's English Department, and for the next decade, his academic life followed a predictable path: he published on the English Romantic poets, wrote about Wordsworth and Blake, and seemed destined for a quiet career in literary scholarship.
But Hirsch had a philosophical bent that would prove consequential.
What Does a Text Actually Mean?
In 1967, Hirsch published a book called Validity in Interpretation. It sounds like the kind of dense academic tome that gathers dust on library shelves, but it tackled a question that matters to anyone who reads anything: when you read a text, whose meaning counts?
This question—which sounds almost absurdly simple—had become surprisingly contentious in literary circles. Some scholars argued that once a writer puts words on paper, those words take on a life of their own. The author's intentions become irrelevant. What matters is what the reader makes of the text, or what the text itself seems to say, independent of what anyone meant by it.
Hirsch thought this was nonsense.
He defended what he called "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant." If you want to understand Shakespeare, you should try to understand what Shakespeare was actually trying to communicate—not just what the words happen to mean to you personally. Hirsch called this approach "intentionalism," the idea that the reader's goal should be to recover the author's intended meaning.
He made a useful distinction that clarified the debate. A text's "meaning," he argued, doesn't change over time—it's whatever the author intended when writing. But a text's "significance" can change. Hamlet meant the same thing in 1600 that it means today, but its significance to us—what it means for our lives, how it connects to our concerns—is different from what it meant to Elizabethan audiences.
This might seem like philosophical hair-splitting, but it has real implications. If meaning is fixed by authorial intent, then there's a right answer about what a text means. You can be wrong in your interpretation. Objectivity in the humanities is possible. If meaning is just whatever readers make of it, then interpretation becomes a free-for-all where every reading is as valid as any other.
Validity in Interpretation was widely cited—over 4,400 citations according to Google Scholar—and widely criticized. But it established Hirsch as a serious thinker willing to take unpopular positions.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
In the late 1970s, Hirsch shifted his attention to the practical question of how people actually read. He and his colleagues designed experiments to test something called "relative readability." The idea was straightforward: take a well-written passage and a poorly written version of the same content. Have people read both. See which one they read faster.
As expected, people read the well-written passages more quickly.
But then something unexpected emerged.
When Hirsch ran these experiments at a Virginia community college, he discovered that writing quality was almost beside the point. If students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled with both versions—the elegant prose and the clunky prose alike. You could craft the most beautifully written paragraph about Grant and Lee, but if readers didn't know who Grant and Lee were, they would stumble through it just the same.
This was the genesis of what Hirsch would call "cultural literacy."
The term captures something important about how reading actually works. When you read a newspaper article, you're not just decoding letters into sounds and sounds into words. You're drawing on a vast reservoir of background knowledge—names, dates, concepts, events—that the writer assumes you already have. The article doesn't stop to explain who the President is, or what Congress does, or where Washington D.C. is located. It assumes you know.
If you don't know, you're lost.
The Book That Sparked a Movement
In 1981, Hirsch presented his theory about cultural literacy to the Modern Language Association. Two years later, he published an article in The American Scholar. Then, with funding from the Exxon Education Foundation, he assembled a team to compile a list of what culturally literate Americans actually need to know.
The result was Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, published in 1987. The book hit the bestseller lists, rising to number two on the New York Times nonfiction list. It included an appendix that would prove more controversial than the argument itself: approximately 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that Hirsch claimed represented "the necessary minimum of American general knowledge."
The timing was fortuitous. That same year, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, another broadside against American education. The two books were often reviewed and discussed together, and together they convinced many Americans that something had gone badly wrong in the schools.
Hirsch, however, has always been careful to distance himself from Bloom. "That was just bad luck," he said of being paired with the other author. "Allan Bloom really was an elitist."
This distinction matters. Bloom was a conservative philosopher lamenting the decline of classical education among university students. Hirsch was making a different, more practical argument: that disadvantaged students suffer most when schools fail to teach common cultural knowledge. The rich kids pick up references to the Civil War and Greek mythology at the dinner table. Poor kids don't have that luxury. If schools don't explicitly teach this shared knowledge, they perpetuate inequality.
The Core Knowledge Movement
Hirsch didn't just write books and move on. In 1986, he established what was initially called the Cultural Literacy Foundation—later renamed the Core Knowledge Foundation—with a specific goal: to develop a detailed, fact-rich curriculum and get it into schools.
This was more ambitious than it might sound. American education has a long tradition of local control, and there has historically been no national curriculum. Different states, different districts, even different schools within the same district might teach completely different content. A student moving from Virginia to California might find that the new school was covering material she'd already learned, while she'd missed material her new classmates had covered months ago.
Hirsch's Core Knowledge Sequence aimed to change that, at least for schools that adopted it. The Sequence lays out, grade by grade, what students should learn—not just vague "learning objectives" but specific content. First graders learn about ancient Egypt and the early civilizations of Mesopotamia. Second graders learn about ancient Greece. Third graders study ancient Rome. And so on, building a coherent, cumulative body of knowledge year after year.
In 1991, Hirsch and his foundation published What Your First Grader Needs to Know, the first in what became known as the Core Knowledge Series. Additional volumes followed for each grade level. The series has been particularly popular among homeschooling parents, who appreciate having a clear roadmap of what to teach and in what order.
By 2015, the Core Knowledge Foundation had become, as one observer put it, "an increasingly popular primary source for the Common Core movement."
The Romantics and the Progressives
To understand Hirsch's critique of American education, you need to understand his view of intellectual history.
Hirsch sees a straight line running from 19th-century Romanticism to 20th-century progressive education. The Romantics—poets like Wordsworth and Blake, philosophers like Rousseau and Schelling—"elevated all that is natural and disparaged all that is artificial." They celebrated spontaneity over discipline, feeling over reason, the individual over society.
This Romantic worldview, Hirsch argues, seeped into American education through progressive educators like John Dewey. The result was a philosophy that trusted children to direct their own learning, that prioritized "skills" over content, that believed in letting knowledge emerge naturally rather than being systematically taught.
Hirsch calls this the educational "Thoughtworld"—a closed intellectual ecosystem hostile to research and dissenting ideas. Teachers are trained to believe that rote learning stifles creativity, that memorization is harmful, that what matters is teaching children how to think rather than giving them anything in particular to think about.
The problem, Hirsch insists, is that thinking skills don't exist in a vacuum. You can't think critically about the Civil War if you don't know what the Civil War was. You can't analyze a poem if you don't know the references it's making. Higher-level skills, he writes, "critically depend upon the automatic mastery of repeated lower-level activities." You have to know things before you can think about things.
The Critics Strike Back
Not everyone was convinced.
Hirsch's list of 5,000 things every American should know was attacked from multiple directions. Some critics objected that it was too Western, too white, too male—a canon of dead Europeans dressed up as neutral "cultural literacy." Why should everyone know about the Battle of Thermopylae but not about the Haitian Revolution? Who decides what counts as essential knowledge?
Other critics attacked Hirsch's pedagogical model. Alfie Kohn, in his 1999 book The Schools Our Children Deserve, accused Hirsch of embracing behaviorism—a model of learning that treats education as the mechanical transmission of facts from teacher to student. This approach, Kohn argued, "has lost credibility among experts in the field even as it retains a stranglehold on the popular consciousness."
Hirsch would counter that his critics had it backward. It's the progressive approach—trusting children to discover knowledge on their own, teaching skills without content—that perpetuates inequality. Rich kids arrive at school already knowing about Shakespeare and the Constitution. Poor kids don't. If schools refuse to explicitly teach cultural knowledge, they're not being democratic. They're ensuring that only children born into educated families will ever acquire it.
The Reading Wars
In recent years, a controversy has erupted over how American schools teach reading—a controversy that both vindicates and complicates Hirsch's legacy.
Investigative journalist Emily Hanford, through her podcast "Sold a Story," exposed how reading instruction in American schools went badly wrong. For decades, many schools taught children to read using methods that ignored or downplayed phonics—the systematic teaching of letter-sound relationships. Instead, they encouraged children to guess at words based on context and pictures.
This approach, based on flawed theories about how reading works, left millions of American children struggling to decode basic words. It was, in a sense, a validation of Hirsch's concern about progressive education run amok: a theory-driven approach that ignored evidence and harmed the students it was supposed to help.
But Hanford's work also complicated Hirsch's story. Hirsch had observed that students "cannot make sense of what they read" and attributed this primarily to a knowledge deficit. The Sold a Story investigation revealed that many students were struggling at an even more basic level—they couldn't decode the words at all. Before you can benefit from background knowledge about the Civil War, you have to be able to read the words "Ulysses" and "Confederacy."
The full picture, it turns out, requires both pieces. Children need systematic phonics instruction to decode words. And they need rich content knowledge to comprehend what those words mean. Hirsch was right about the importance of knowledge, even if he didn't fully account for the phonics crisis that was simultaneously undermining American reading instruction.
A Life in Ideas
Hirsch, now in his late nineties, has spent more than half a century making essentially the same argument: that American schools need to teach a common body of knowledge, that skills cannot be separated from content, that vague educational philosophies have real consequences for real children.
His 2016 book, Why Knowledge Matters, identifies what he sees as the three major problems with American education: an emphasis on teaching abstract skills rather than knowledge, individualism rather than communal learning, and "developmentalism"—the idea that children should only be taught what is "appropriate" for their age, rather than being exposed to challenging content that expands their horizons.
Whether you agree with Hirsch or not, his influence is undeniable. The Core Knowledge curriculum is used in schools across America and has been adapted for the United Kingdom. The Common Core standards, whatever their merits and flaws, owe something to his insistence that there should be shared expectations for what students learn. And the broader debate about education—skills versus knowledge, child-centered versus teacher-directed, progressive versus traditional—continues to unfold largely along the lines he helped define.
It all started with a reading experiment gone wrong, and a professor's realization that his students had never heard of Robert E. Lee.
The Hermeneutic Connection
There's an interesting through-line in Hirsch's career that often goes unremarked. His early work on interpretation—the idea that readers should try to recover what authors actually meant—connects directly to his later work on education.
Both are about shared meaning. Both are about the idea that communication isn't just a private experience but depends on common reference points. When Hirsch argued in Validity in Interpretation that texts have objective meanings that readers can recover, he was making a claim about shared knowledge: that readers and writers can meet in a common space of understanding.
When he later argued for cultural literacy, he was making the same claim in a different register: that citizens of a democracy need shared knowledge to communicate with each other, to understand their newspapers and their history, to participate in public life.
In both cases, Hirsch was pushing back against a kind of fragmentation—the postmodern idea that meaning is infinitely personal, that texts mean whatever we want them to mean, that knowledge is just a social construction with no objective basis. He insisted, against the intellectual currents of his time, that there are facts, that meaning can be shared, that some things really are worth knowing.
Whether that makes him a conservative or a democrat, an elitist or an egalitarian, depends on how you look at it. What's clear is that he took ideas seriously enough to spend his life fighting for them.