fta: But the progressives, while dominant, have been unable to improve educational outcomes for low-income students, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, and today, liberal educators and politicians are giving Hirsch’s ideas a second, much more admiring look. Many now support a set of grade-specific guidelines developed by the National Governors Association in 2009 known as the Common Core State Standards. Hirsch didn’t write the Common Core, but the guidelines match the expectations set forth in the rigorous public school curricula Hirsch developed with his Core Knowledge Foundation, and he is credited with laying the intellectual groundwork. “He showed the fundamental importance that knowledge plays to develop the foundations of literacy,” says David Coleman, one of the chief architects of the Common Core, who calls Hirsch’s research “absolutely foundational.” It was back in 1987 that “Don” Hirsch, then English department head at the University of Virginia, published his first popular work, Cultural Literacy. The book proposed that all public schoolchildren should be provided with instruction aimed at familiarizing them with a wide variety of topics, including literature, geography, history, math, science, art and music, in order to have the background knowledge that would make them successful readers and learners. But the book, subtitled “What Every American Needs To Know,” quickly became famous not for its seven dense chapters of educational theory but for The List — a 63-page index of 5,000 essential subjects and concepts that Hirsch believed teachers should impart to their students, arrayed in alphabetical order: A.D., ad absurdum, adagio, Adam and Eve, Adams, John.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:53:22 +0000
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