E. D. Hirsch Jr.

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Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr. (born March 22, 1928) is a U.S. educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his writings about cultural literacy.

Raised in Memphis and educated at Cornell and Yale, Hirsch began his career as an English professor and a scholar of the romantic poets. His early publications include Wordsworth and Schelling (1960), an adaptation of his Yale dissertation, and Innocence and Experience (1964), a monograph on Blake.

The second phase of his career centered on questions of literary interpretation and hermeneutics. His books Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976) argue, against many new critical and postmodernist claims to the contrary, that the author's intention must be the ultimate determiner of meaning. Hirsch proposed the distinction between "meaning" (as intended by the author) and "significance" (as perceived by a reader or critic).

In 1977 Hirsch published The Philosophy of Composition, an investigation into the question of what makes prose more or less readable. His work on composition led to a major shift in his career. While giving tests of relative readability at two colleges in Virginia, he discovered that, while the relative readability of a text was an important factor in determining comprehension, an even more important factor was background knowledge. Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Grant and Lee, while students at a community college struggled with the passage, apparently because they lacked basic understanding of the Civil War. This and related discoveries led Hirsch to formulate the concept of cultural literacy -- the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. He concluded that schools should not be agnostic about what is taught but should teach a highly specific curriculum that would allow children to understand things writers take for granted.

Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986, and wrote Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know in 1987. He also co-wrote [[The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy][1] in 1988. Cultural Literacy became a best-seller and was even spoofed on Saturday Night Live. But Hirsch's ideas were extremely controversial. Although himself a liberal, he was attacked as a neo-conservative and advocate for a conservative, lilly-white curriculum, a promoter of "drill and kill" pedagogy and a reactionary force.

In 1996, Hirsch published The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. In it, Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrates teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning". Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.

His most recent book is The Knowledge Deficit (2006), in which he once again makes the case that the cause of disappointing reading performance is a lack of background knowledge.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For a critical view of Hirsch, see The Schools Our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn.