1 -- E.D. Hirsch

E.D. Hirsch Jr, in the excerpt from the list "What Literate Americans Know," (audaciously) attempted to compile an exhaustive list of what is worth knowing. My first task is to compose a post on what is worth knowing, from my own view.

I started out attempting to create a Hirsch-style list of all that is worth knowing for the field of History. I spent some time outlining the different historical period, then looking over wikipedia to get a list of terms, people, events, locations, technology, theories, groups, etc., etc. etc., that was forth knowing. It was all overwhelming. I tailored the list to just American history and started again. I started with something I thought I knew a lot about -- the American Civil War. It was easy enough to create a list of major battles (Gettysburg, Antietam, Vicksburg), and the major generals (Lee, Grant, Sherman, Jackson), a few important politicians (Lincoln, Davis, McClellan). What about others? I added Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, and John Brown to better include the slavery element before and during the war. What about the social element -- the draft riots in NYC, the role of immigrants in the north. The influence of the British in the South. The blockade, the Western battles that are not as well known? Where was the common soldier whose name is not recorded? Where is the human death toll? Where is the interpretation, the point of view? A list just one event could be infinite, and still would always be incomplete because it would be devoid of context and nuance, and interpretation.

Then I realized that this ludicrous endeavor had already been done. The NYS Social Studies standards is the big list that all social studies teachers in NYS must live by in order to prepare their students for the Regents Exam. It is generally lamented by teachers and future teachers that such a list forces us to "teach to the test." I think that Hirsch would generally approve of this idea, that a finite list of things worth learning has been handed down to teachers from Albany legislators, and that we must follow it because our students will be tested on it. It is not all bad, however. In addition to content-knowledge, the Standards also include skills, such Document-based research, and critical analysis of sources. The standards also help provide a framework on which form a curriculum and create lesson plans. A good teacher, I believe, can use the standards to advantage. It doesn't have to be a straight-jacket.

Recently, I had an interesting exchange with Dr. Tuck on the class discussion board regarding the finding of a middle path between Delpit and Hirsch. I will link this discussion as soon as I figure out how. I got to thinking about Hirsch again and what parts of his ideas I seem to still be clinging to. A part of me wants to defend some of Hirsch's ideas, while rejecting others. I decided to return to the Hirsch reading and see what exactly was it that I want to save, and what do I want to discard -- and once the parts I disagree with are discarded, is there anything left of Hirsch's position. In looking back at Hirsch, I stumbled onto another article by Hirsch on line that I say a little about -- and another educational theorist, Howard Gardner, who wrote a counter essay to Hirsch, whose ideas I like very much.

Those two essays can be found here.

So, taking Hirsch's "Literacy and Cultural Literacy" in a vacuum without considering any of his other writing, what is it that I agree with -- or at least seem to agree with if it's taken at face value?

First, Hirsch talks about the Illiad, and Shakespeare, and Dickens, and US Grant and RE Lee and Greek and Roman Mythology, and dozens of other examples from history and literature. The simple fact is that I like these things. I think they have value. I think that they have value even to learners from diverse backgrounds. We cannot, and should not, eliminate the work and deeds of every "dead white male" just because they are "dead white males". The goal, at least as I see it is to give the dead white males some more diverse company. "Many items of literate culture," Hirsch says, "are arbitrary, but that does not make them dispensable." (Hirsch 1988, 28).

"We know instinctively that to understand what somebody is saying, we must understand more than the surface meaning of words; we have to understand the context as well." (Hirsch 1988, 3). I agree with this, because the context comes from our shared culture. There is nothing that I find in this article that requires an abandonment of heritage culture for shared culture -- cultures can live within cultures, I think. The context comes from the shared part of our history, and it also comes from popular culture.

Hirsch quotes Sociologist Orlando Patterson in saying:

"To assume that this wider culture is static is an error; in fact it is not. It's not a WASP culture; it doesn't belong to any group. It is essentially and constantly changing, and it is open. What is needed is recognition that the accurate metaphor or model for this wider literacy is not domination, but dialectic; each group participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed, as much as any other group... The English language no longer belongs to any single group or nation. The same goes for any other area of the wider culture." (Hirsch 1988, 11).

I cannot see the problem with this idea. This seems inclusive and open-minded to me.

So, what's the matter with Hirsch? Why is he the boogie-man in so many of my classmates online discussion posts, and in-class discussions. Well, his article, linked above, "Finding the Answers In Drills and Rigor", I find very disturbingly wrongheaded. If Hirsch is advocating rote recitations of "agreed upon facts" then I definitely do not agree with him. This is the worst way to teach anything, especially history. In this article, he also defends the use of standardized tests, he states that "these tests, even in their much-maligned multiple choice forms, are highly correlated with each other and with real-world reading skills." -- This is likely only because Hirsch is self-defining the meaning of reading skills.

As I've said previously, I do not have a problem with the content that Hirsch is advocating that students learn, as long as his "list" is open-ended and willing to welcome the content of other cultures as well, on equal terms. This is something that our diverse society will constantly be doing. But, as is clear from his second article, his ideas about how this material is learned, and what we do with it is completely wrong.

The Howard Gardner article makes the important point that content is meaningless, like an unused tool, if we don't know how to think critically about the content, analyze, assess, interpret that content.

Gardner makes a very valid point, that we live in a world where content information is at our fingertips (in 1999 when he wrote this article, but certainly in 2009). We are rarely more than a few feet away from a computer hooked to the internet. Wikipedia, Google, are everyday tools that put content knowledge at out fingertips. We don't have to memorize "facts". Research doesn't require hours in the library anymore -- it requires a simple Google search.

But our technology raises a new problem, unique to the modern age, and I think Gardner's idea of critical thinking skills prepares students much more for this world than does Hirsch. We now have a problem of too much content, from too many sources. Wikipedia for example, is often criticized for being inaccurate because it is an open-community source (studies have been done that show that it is surprisingly accurate however). So what source do we trust? And how do we assess all this information? That is the skill of the 21st century that Gardner is advocating. We need interpretative and analytical skills to make sense of an over abundance of content coming from infinite sources. Those skills are much more useful than the rote memorization of "accepted facts."

So, this post is way longer than I think most of my others will be, but Hirsch has been a sticking point for me from the beginning, and I hope that I have more clearly separated those parts of Hirsch which I agree from those I do not.