E. D. Hirsch

E. D. Hirsch
Hirsch in 2015
Born	Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. (1928-03-22) March 22, 1928 (age 96) Memphis, Tennessee, US
Occupation(s)	Literary critic, educator, and writer

E. D. Hirsch is Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. (/hɜːrʃ/; born March 22, 1928. He is an American educator and academic literary critic. He is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia.^[1]

In the 1960s Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation made an important work to contemporary literary theory and he was called "the founder of contemporary intentionalism".^[2]

In popular culture Hirsch is best known for his work on cultural literacy,^[3] and is the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

He is a long-term critic of American schools, and promotes ideas for improving the education of children. His The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them (1996) was hated by the liberal left. It also managed to annoy the right wing because it attacked the local control of schools. in 2016 he published Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing our Children from Failed Educational Theories. This outlined three major problems with education in the United States. These are, according to him, the emphasis on teaching skills, such as critical thinking skills, rather than knowledge, individualism rather than communal learning, and developmentalism, that is, teaching children what is "appropriate" for their age.

Beginning in 1990s, Hirsch began publishing books in the Core Knowledge Grader Series which the Foundation describes as "an engaging, illustrated guide to the essential knowledge outlined in the Core Knowledge Sequence".^[4] This series of books was received well by parents educating children at home, and it has been adopted by many school systems.

Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on education reform, wrote in 2013 that Hirsch was "the most important education reformer of the past half-century."^[5]

1. ↑ E.D. Hirsch Jr., Core Knowledge, archived from the original on December 30, 2012, retrieved February 2, 2015
2. ↑ Søren Harnow Klausen, "Levels of Literary Meaning," Philosophy and Literature, vol. 41, no. 1 (April 2017), p. 71).
3. ↑ E.D. Hirsch Jr., Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 March 2013, retrieved 2 February 2015
4. ↑ What Your __ Grader Needs to Know, Core Knowledge Foundation, archived from the original on February 8, 2015, retrieved February 6, 2015
5. ↑ Stern, Sol (December 6, 2013), "The Redemption of E.D. Hirsch", City Journal, archived from the original on September 23, 2015, retrieved October 8, 2019