“E.D. Hirsch is no pantomime villain”

The American academic’s work has been appropriated by the government to justify its curriculum, but are his ideas as clear cut as we've been led to believe? Tim Taylor takes a closer look...

The thing most teachers know about E.D. Hirsch is that he is Michael Gove’s favourite academic from the field of education. An 85-year-old retired English literature professor from Virginia, Hirsch argues that a lack of “core knowledge” penalises children from poor homes and reduces social mobility, damaging, as a consequence, social cohesion and democratic participation. These views play well with Mr. Gove and others who like to argue there are easy answers to the problems of our current education system.

However, E.D. Hirsch is no pantomime villain, nor is he an idiot; his views on teaching and learning are far more nuanced and reasonable than they have been portrayed by politicians or the tabloid press. Central to his argument is the theory that human minds acquire spoken language and written language in entirely different ways. Borrowing from the work of Steven Pinker, Hirsch argues the human brain does not need to be taught how to find meaning in spoken language, but has not evolved to understand written language in the same way. This means the rules, codes, and conventions of written language have to be taught directly through explicit instruction and practice, while the acquisition and development of new vocabulary and knowledge happens implicitly through engagement and experience of learning in familiar contexts.

This translates to the classroom as a mixed approach where children spend part of the day (no more than 40–60 minutes) learning the skills of decoding and encoding for reading and writing through short focused activities. The rest of the day is spent developing language, vocabulary, and skills through implicit teaching methods in familiar contexts. Put another way, this is a curriculum where children spend an hour a-day learning reading, writing, and maths, followed by a further four hours studying by means of cross curricular activities.

Now, I’m not an expert on the American system, and I do not want to sound complacent, but none of this sounds like anything new to me. In fact, most of Hirsch’s book has the ring of a man arguing with people who are no longer in the room. For example, he spends a whole chapter in The Knowledge Deficit making the case for using phonics as part of a mixed approach to reading. And he returns time and again to the importance of teaching explicit knowledge to children, such as place names, historical events, and scientific ideas. None of this sounds controversial to me. In fact, in 20 years of teaching, I’ve never heard a single head, teacher, or adviser ever argue in opposition to any of these ideas. The 2000 Curriculum, much maligned by Michael Gove, placed knowledge first in the list of those attributes that children needed to develop to become effective learners, and the new curriculum, which is supposed to be far more rigorous, has very little extra content when you look closely at the programmes of study.

So, you ask, why all the fuss? The truth is, Hirsch’s ideas have been cherry-picked and interpreted outside of their true American context by those who seek to create a narrative that blames educational failure on a small number of academics. This is both convenient, since it positions hard-working teachers as victims of the ‘enemies of promise’ and cynical, because it deliberately misrepresents both Hirsch’s more substantial argument and the views of more ‘progressive’ academics. This has resulted in a climate where pedagogically neutral terms such as ‘child-centred’ and ‘group-work’ are disparaged and ridiculed by politicians and educationalists with an axe to grind and an interest in closing down the debate.

I would not recommend The Knowledge Deficit as a must-read. It’s polemical in parts, a bit old-fashioned in others, and very boring towards the end (when Hirsch talks in detail about testing in American schools). However, neither would I say it is a bad book, full of terrible ideas and theories. Hirsch is right to remind us that knowledge is important, knowing things is not the same as looking them up on Google, and that children who can not read well and speak well are at a major disadvantage. Of course, we all take from books the ideas we find most convincing, and Michael Gove is no exception. For me I will take the view that education is about more than satisfying the needs of the state and the deep-set ideological dogma of the few, it is about finding practical and contextual solutions to the problem of engaging and educating young minds, and those solutions come in a range of different forms.