On The Limits of the Transmittal View of Education and the Influence of E. D. Hirsch

Walter Feinberg

Rethinking Schools, Spring, 1999

The Influence of E. D. Hirsch

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is a familiar figure to parents, teachers and administrators His books has been favorably reviewed in a number of national publications; His first book, Cultural Literacy, was on the New York Times best Seller list; Hirsch-like criticism of public education can be heard on National Public Radio, or read in The New York Times. Hirsch’s source books for parents of primary school children (individual volumes bearing titles such as What Your 1’st Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First Grade Education) can be found in virtually every nationally based book store . (These are working books with stories, historical narratives, math and science facts which goes under the series title of "The Core Knowledge Series".); His enterprise has received support from conservatives such as Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch as well as from liberals such as Henry Louis Gates. The series meets the concerns of many conservatives for greater curricular uniformity, and for emphasizing (although not exclusively) the richness of the European tradition and the American contribution to civilization. It also meets the approval of some who want to assure some representation of women and minorities and who are sensitive to the growing economic inequality in America and who accept his insinuation, especially prominent in his first book, Cultural Literacy, (1987) that economic equality rests on subject matter uniformity and his claim, especially prominant in his second book, The Schools We Need, (1996) that the misguided ideas of progressive education is responsible for much of the ills of the poor.

The Basic Message

Hirsch’s basic message is that there is important subject matter content that all students need to learn that this content should be appropriately sequenced, uniformly paced and that its achievement should be objectively measured. Sequencing has to do with the logic of the subject matter and not the "age readiness" of the child, a concept which he dismisses with considerable scorn. Thus Hirsch’s curriculum is content driven. Children need to master the simpler elements of this content before they can move on to the more complex ones, and all children at a certain grade should receive this material at approximately the same time without wasteful repetition from one year to the next. Children must learn fundamental content regardless of the methods used to teach it. He rejects the idea that students can learn the tools of inquiry, or how to know, without learning the content entailed in specific subjects and he defend the use of memory and repeated practice feeling that they have been neglected because of an overemphasis on progressive education. He is also a defender of whole class instruction because he believes that it is often the most efficient way of delivering knowledge and skills, and he is a harsh critic of "the project method". Finally, he holds that the facts and skills that children should be taught in school must be continually measured by "objective" tests, and that those who fail should receive remedial work and, if necessary, repeat the grade.

Problems

Because Hirsch is having an ever increasingly sympathetic hearing by the American media it is important that his ideas receive a close inspection. While the basic message--"curriculum is important and that it should not be neglected in attempts to advance the authenticity of the childhood experience" is hard to argue with--there are many problems with his ideas about Classrooms, schools and the role of education in economic well being.

Classroom Level Problems

1. Hirsch assumes without evidence that most classroom teachers are the educational descendants of progressive educators like Dewey and W. H. Kilpatrick, a disciple of Dewey at Teachers’ College; that most classrooms are dominated by the project method and other Progressive innovations; he mistakes the talk of some professors of education, often misconstrued and taken out of context, as the reality of the American public school. He provides an image of the typical classroom as some Deweyesque laboratory school where children or their teachers do whatever they want whenever they want to do it.

This is not just a historical issue. if he is wrong, if, for example, progressive educators were not successful in wiping out rote memory from the classroom, or if, as some studies have shown, rote memory is more common in schools with poor and minority children in them, then we will have misunderstood the cause of classroom failure.

2. In his drive for a teacher proof curriculum he neglects to analyze the multiple influences on teachers or the extent to which they use the (as if it were one thing) "project method" or other related pedagogies and he fails to understand the way in which many teachers incorporate the project method into more traditional ways of teaching traditionally defined "basic skills" (see, for example, Bob Peterson, "Tracking and The Project Method" Rethinking Education, Winter, 1998/1999).

Hirsch would allow that only half of the curriculum be devoted to the items on his core knowledge list. If, indeed, many teachers are only devoting half of the class time to project material, this would be well within his guidelines. He says nothing about this issue although he gives the impression that the project method is rampant in the schools.

3. He believes that progressive educators have succeeded in erasing rote and memorization from the classroom and that the project method and other progressive inroads are responsible for what he holds to be the sorry state of American education and the putative decline in America’s competitive position in the world. He provides no surveys of teachers to discover what their classrooms actually are like.

Hirsch fails to acknowledge the fact that a lot of testing goes on in schools of the kind that he supports, that this is increasing, and there is now considerable concern about the effects of over-testing students. By writing as if testing were a rare occurrence, Hirsch has no way to address any of the indirect effects of testing on children.

4 . In his emphasis on content, he underestimates the importance of pedagogy. This is because the image of education guiding his presentation emphasizes teachers talking (rather than listening) to students. This is probably the reason that he virtually ignores ethnographic research on classroom interaction and relies almost entirely on quantitative psychological studies. A recent report by the New York Times reported fourth graders experiencing nausea and sleeplessness as they prepare for a new state wide test. By ignoring these effects, we have no basis for weighing costs and benefits. Hirsch tells us what he thinks are the costs of progressive methods, but not what might be the costs of such heavy emphasis on tests. Without this we have little on which to base a judgment about the value of increasing standardized testing in schools.

The School Level

1. He reinforces the unrefined view that American schools are failing at all levels and for all children. Yet given this claim he cannot adequately explain the admittedly superior quality of American colleges and universities nor the fact that progressive pedagogy is more likely to be used among children from upper income homes.

2. He rejects the view that racism accounts for the problem with many schools in the inner city by folding racism into the failure to provide a core curriculum. Yet he fails to consider that regardless of the material race, class and gender do influence the way material is presented in ways that serve to reproduce patterns of dominance in our society.

3. He is rightly concerned about the high mobility level of poor and minority children, and thinks that a unified core and pacing from school to school would help significantly. Yet given less drastic alternatives-- for example, in cases where children move close by they could be allowed to stay in the same building and where this is not practical extra help could be provided--to require this change for all schools and all students seems radical and unworkable. As we will see, Hirsch actually seems to back off from this unified core in some of his more recent presentations, although he does so with out acknowledging the effect on mobile poor students.

The Social/Economic Level

1. Although some of Hirsch’s concern is directed at the plight of the poor and the marginalized (a term that he avoids probably because he believes it has a certain political loading which he thinks can be avoided), the work is marred by both a patrician style-- "The children of the poor . . . .should learn the value of hard work"-- and by a shallow analysis of poverty and the condition of American education.

He simply does not consider the effect of the Reagan Bush policies on poverty. This is truly unfortunate because while schools can be of some service in individual cases they are unlikely to off-set large scale economic and social policies. Yet Hirsch is silent even about the most obvious relationship between economic policy and poverty-- unequal school financing.

2. He reinforces the questionable link between international achievement on standardized tests and national economic performance for developed nations without acknowledging that (at least in terms of standard measures of productivity) the American economy has been humming along quite well while the economies of nations, such as Japan, with higher scoring students has stagnated .

Do Hirsch’s Schools Work

Hirsch claims that the schools that have tried his methods work and that reading scores especially have been raised. This should be greeted as good news-- whenever a school performs well or is turned around, children benefit. However, there is evidence that highly standardized curriculum does not necessarily produce better long term results. For example one writer has argued that one country, which Hirsch describes as having one of the "most detailed and demanding core curriculums in the world" Switzerland, does considerably worse than the United States on the percentage of adults that fall into the highest range of literacy while doing somewhat worse at the lower levels. (Gerald W. Bracey's "TIMSS, the New Basics, and the Schools We Need" February 18, 1998 edition of Education Week .  vol. 14, no. 41, pp. 3-6). The difference that Hirsch ignores is one between Edeucational efficiency (how fast students can get to a certain point) and educational productivity (how much knowledge, information, skills etc. They have acquired upon completion of formal education.)

The reason Hirsch can claim some success with his schools may be only partly related to the curriculum. His schools are usually staffed by teachers who are committed to the project and who work together to effect it. Thus to fairly appraise his schools one would need either to try them out on teachers who are forced to adopt his curriculum, or to compare them with other schools with equally dedicated and involved teachers. Hirsch is tone deaf to issues of pedagogy, except that he likes rote and memory more than some others, but it may be exactly the level of involvement within the schools that enables him to claim some success. If I am right, what this means is that his philosophy of education may well be failing to capture some of the more important features of good teaching, some of which is likely present in the schools that have adopted his program, and that other schools that simply try to adopt his ideas as he presents them in his books will have considerable difficulty.

An Alternative Philosophy of Education

The most fundamental problem with Hirsch’s work as I see it is that he has an inadequate understanding of the character of education. The problem can be seen clearly by looking at what Hirsch says about meaning: "Whether a word is learned by targeted practice or by the contextual method of enriched language use, its actual meaning is, for the most part, just a brute fact. In a sense, all words are learned by rote." Given this view, the way in which meaning is learned is incidental as is the role of the teacher. Meaning is meaning and it doesn’t matter much how it is delivered. Targeted practice or enriched use are simply two vehicles that will transport us to the same place. This is crux of Hirsch’s theory. His books are embellishments of it. They tell us why children do not share enough meaning with adults and how to get them to do so. If this is correct, then schools should work as long as teachers and students do what they are told. Now, as we will see below, this is the philosophical implications of Hirsch’s views but it does not necessarily capture what is important in the schools in which his program has been tried out.

Hirsch’s philosophy holds a transmission view of meaning and reinforces tell and tally educational practices. Teachers hold meaning in their heads and their job is to transmit it in the most efficient way to the head of the student. Whole class instruction, telling (which can include story telling) and rote memorization are frequently seen as the most effective means for accomplishing this exchange, and standardized tests are the most effective way to tally how well the task has been accomplished. (I suspect that this is why class size and unequal funding are not examined by Hirsch as factors in achievement.) The passage I quoted above expresses two elements of this view. The first is that meaning is "brute fact" and the second is that it is learned "by rote". There is also an attitude towards meaning that is communicated by the passage. Since adults have it and children are expected to learn it, the appropriation of meaning is essentially passive.

Now consider an alternative view that is best described as transactional, and shared in some way by many of the educators Hirsch dismisses . This view takes meaning as a social activity, one that originates in the organic and social needs of people. A ball is not a "spherical object used in games." That is "a ball". Rather a ball is a specific way of relating to others people, to other things. It involves patterns of interaction between self and other. A ball, in other words is seeing, feeling, watching, holding, tossing, catching, running with, tagging, hitting shouting, etc. Meaning is not an isolated string of brute facts that one head implants in another. It is shaped in the context of doing with others.

Meaning serves to organize and coordinate activity towards some end or purpose. It is a doing and that doing also entails the specialized doings that we call reading, listening, talking and writing. These forms of interaction enable us to be conscious of our purposes, and to reflect on them and, when appropriate, to change them. Contrary to Hirsch, in the transactional view meaning is not a brute fact. Rather it is indefinite in its associations and is determined to a degree by context and company (we can always learn a new way to handle a ball, a new game to engage in).Meaning has both a crystallized and a fluid quality to it. The crystallized quality focuses on the constraints; the fluid on the possibility for developments and change through communication. In the transactional view the goal of education is to refine the process of meaning making, through the interactions that occur between writer, reader and text, between teacher, student and text and between different students.

In the transactional view meanings are not static; They are not just "brute fact." They changes over time, sometimes as a result of deliberate interruption and sometimes not. This process of meaning-making can be political as in the conversion of words like "gay" or "queer". where the alteration involves a change in the tonal quality generated by the various associations, and in the feelings connected to those associations. The conversion points to the fact that meaning and meaningful are closely connected. The one emphasizes the conceptual associations tied together through certain words, the other the connection that those associations have to our experience, and to our lives. When that experience cannot be assumed by a teacher, telling must allow for hearing and seeing. This is why the experience of the child can not be ignored.

While meaning is indefinite in the transactional view, learning is indeterminate. Meaning cannot be fully "told" because learning involves a process that continues even after "definitions" have brought the crystallized feature of meaning to our attention. Yet even if we focus only on meaning as crystallized, it cannot be learned through "rote", at least not as rote is usually understood. This is so for two reasons. First because real telling, even in Hirsch’s terms, telling to the totally uninitiated, would involve an unraveling of a dictionary and a culture. What is a dog? A dog is a mammal with pronounced canine teeth. What is a mammal and what are canine teeth. The meaning of a word when unraveled explodes perhaps exponentially. Second, because the meaning of a word in normal discourse is always imbedded in a social context. Thus we cannot tell "the" meaning until we know the part of "the" meaning that the child is missing. Of course, there are contexts, cultural as well as intellectual, where we can make good guesses about what is missing and seek to address them by a kind of "telling". Yet, until that which is told makes sense in terms of organizing or reorganizing experience, it is not learned.

Meaning is learned through a process of interaction where hearer and listener engage in a process of figuring out the unspoken context, working through the missing elements, or figuring out how words, usually confined to one domain, have been extended to another. Listen to a foreigner as she compliments your "weird" cooking. The occasion, the tone, the food tells you that she means "unique" although both suggest a "standing out", a noticing. To enter into a conversation with such a foreigner involves recognizing that the word does not fit this context, identifying an alternative possible word, one that might fit better, understanding where "weird" and "unique" converge, explaining the difference between them and why one might be mistaken for the other and asking the person whether "unique" might better communicate her intent. The more cultures diverge, the more this work has to be done and the less satisfactory decontextualized "telling" and "rote" memorizing will be.

What we think of as rote is most successful when a large network of cultural meaning is already shared and the assignment and meaning can be anchored in a larger, assumed set of associations and purposes. Rote is not the main element in learning because meaning is not a brute fact, and because there are different kinds of rote. Some kinds, ( I used the example of kids practicing the same basketball shot over and over again) are connected to a wider sense of purpose and history while others are just rote. This suggests that it is not a matter of incidental concern whether a word is learned by targeted practice or enriched language as Hirsch suggests. While there is surely room for targeted practice to take place, where in some extended sense of the terms teachers "tell" and students learn by "rote", it is critical to develop classrooms where telling does not dominate and where teachers engage students in serious conversations, activities and projects not only with themselves but with other students as well and where teachers listen as much as they talk.

A transactional classroom would have a lot of doing, a lot of engagement and a lot of serious conversation about practice because it does not hold that the role of schools is just to transfer meaning from one head to another. Its goal is the refinement of living through a refinement of the activities of engagement and enjoyment. Telling and tallying have a role in this process, but for the teacher looking, listening and engaging children must be a critical part of the "presentation" of knowledge.

The difference between a transmittal view of education and a transactional one also influences the kind of research that one takes as significant. Much of the most important recent work in education has helped us to understand how to listen to children. (Think, for example of Gilligan’s work on the moral development of boys and girls.) Because Hirsch’s philosophy is focused on effective strategies for transferring meaning and neglects the skills needed to listen to and hear what children have to say, he virtually ignores such work. To hear students requires more than what Hirsch wants-- uniformly paced, whole class instruction into a core curriculum evaluated by standardized tests. It requires talented teachers, decent working conditions, smaller classes and research that can inform teachers on how to listen as well and how to teach students to talk to one another and to critically approach the material that they work with. It also requires that students understand evaluation procedures as aids in their own individual and collective growth and not as threats standing in the way of their future status and material well being.

The Evolution of E. D. Hirsch

If one listens carefully to Hirsch these days, especially as he speaks to audiences that are more sophisticated about educational matters, one can hear a change in tone and a slight recognition that curriculum may not be all there is to schools. Hirsch now wants schools to have a core curriculum, but no, it need not be his. Different schools might even have different cores. (An admission that is hard to reconcile with his belief that a single interschool core is best for highly mobile poor children). The core curriculum is less of a prescription and more of a guide. It can help teachers in a school think collectively about their goals and communicate them to parents. He now speaks of his own proposal not as the cure for all the ills of the schools but, like a vitamin, one of the nutrients schools need, but certainly not the only one. This new Hirsch is emerging after considerable criticism of his work although there is an important question about whether the old and the new Hirsch are really compatible and there is little acknowledgment of the impact of these critics. Thus while Hirsch number one appears as a stone fortress, keeping out any alien ideas, Hirsch number two seems more like a sponge that dissolves otherness by absorbing it into itself. It could be argued that this new Hirsch was present all along in the ifs, ands, buts, and maybes of the old. Or, it could be argued that the new Hirsch is simply involved in a strategy to make the old more palatable to people who think that other things--children’s interest, self esteem, motivation, cooperative dispositions, enriched experience, etc.-- do matter, and that just throwing vitamins at the schools will not solve their problems.