Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. (; born March 22, 1928) is an American educator, literary critic, and theorist. He is a professor emeritus of humanities at the University of Virginia.
Hirsch is best known for his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which was a national best-seller and catalyst for the standards movement in American education. Cultural Literacy included a list of approximately 5,000 "names, phrases, dates, and concepts every American should know" to be "culturally literate". Hirsch's arguments for cultural literacy and the list's contents were controversial and widely debated until the early 1990s.
Hirsch is the founder and chairman of the non-profit Core Knowledge Foundation, which publishes and periodically updates the Core Knowledge Sequence, a set of unusually detailed curriculum guidelines for pre-K through eighth grade.
In 1991, Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation published What Your First Grader Needs to Know, the first volume in what is popularly known as "the Core Knowledge Series". Additional volumes followed, as did revised editions. The series now begins with What Your Preschooler Needs to Know and ends with What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know. The "series" books follow the curriculum guidelines of the Core Knowledge Sequence, are commonly used in Core Knowledge schools and other elementary schools, and have also become a favorite among homeschooling parents.
Before turning to education, Hirsch wrote on English literature and theory of interpretation. His book Validity in Interpretation (1967) is considered an important contribution to hermeneutics. In it, Hirsch argues for intentionalism—the idea that the reader's goal should be to recover the author's meaning.
Early life and education Hirsch was born on March 22, 1928, in Memphis, Tennessee. His parents were Eric Donald Hirsch Sr. and Leah (Aschaffenburg) Hirsch. His father was a cotton broker who worked for Allenberg Cotton and was honored as "Cotton Man of the Year for 1956".Cornell Alumni News, 1 April 1957, p. 169.
Hirsch attended Memphis public schools, the Pentecost Garrison School (Memphis), the Metairie Park Country Day School (New Orleans), and the Todd School for Boys (Woodstock, Illinois).
In 1950, Hirsch graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a B.A. in English. After a brief stint in the naval reserves, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English literature at Yale University, completing his doctorate in 1957.
Work on Romantic poets From 1956 to 1966, Hirsch taught in the English Department at Yale University. During this time, most of his academic work concerned the English Romantic poets.
Hirsch's first book, Wordsworth and Schelling, was a revision of his doctoral dissertation. In the book, he explicates Wordsworth's philosophic ideas and poems by juxtaposing them with the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
In 1964, Hirsch published his second book, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. In this book, Hirsch took issue with "systematic" critics of Blake's work, including Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. Hirsch argued that Blake's ideas and outlook changed radically over time and that early works like The Songs of Innocence do not express the same worldview as later works like The Songs of Experience.
UVA and Hermeneutics
In 1966, Hirsch started teaching English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. The next year, he published Validity in Interpretation (1967). This was his first book-length work on hermeneutics and theory of interpretation. However, it was not his first published work on the subject. He had previously published an article, "Objective Interpretation" (PMLA, 1960) and a review of the German edition of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (Review of Metaphysics, 1965). Both early pieces were reprinted as appendices in Validity in Interpretation.
In Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch defends what he calls "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant." He argues that it is possible (at least in some cases) for readers to recover an author's intended meaning—and that readers should make this the goal of interpretation. Hirsch makes a distinction between the "meaning" of a text, which does not change over time, and the "significance" of the text, which does change over time. In addition, he argues that objectivity in interpretation is possible and that we can have objective knowledge in humanistic studies.
In a review of important works on interpretation, Sherri Irvin gives the following summary of Validity in Interpretation: The seminal statement of actual intentionalism: Hirsch holds that 'meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of physical signs or things' (23), though he allows that linguistic convention constrains the meanings the author can intend for a particular utterance. He argues that the author's intention is necessary to fix meaning, since the application of conventions alone would typically leave a text wildly indeterminate. Hirsch's "intentionalist" and "objectivist" views on hermeneutics are close to those of the Italian jurist Emilio Betti. On the other hand, his views run largely contrary to the views of Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as the views of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley on the "semantic autonomy" of works of literature, as expressed in "The Intentional Fallacy."
Hirsch continued to publish on hermeneutics and the concept of authorial intent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many of his articles from this period are collected in his second book on hermeneutics, The Aims of Interpretation (1975).
Hirsch's views on hermeneutics have been widely cited—Google Scholar lists more than 4,400 citations for Validity in Interpretation—but they have also been widely criticized.
Composition and Theory of Writing In the early 1970s Hirsch began working on the theory of writing and composition, publishing several articles and a book, The Philosophy of Composition (1977). Hirsch called the central concept in this book "relative readability". One piece of writing is more readable, in terms of relative readability, than another if it conveys the same meaning but is easier to read and read more quickly than the alternative passage. The Philosophy of Composition was widely reviewed and generated numerous discussions in composition circles for several years, but Hirsch's work in this area is no longer widely discussed.
In the late 1970s, Hirsch and certain colleagues at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on relative readability. Participants in the experiments were assigned either a well-written passage or a poorly written (stylistically degraded) version of the same passage. Hirsch and his colleagues recorded reading time to determine whether the well-written passages were in fact read more quickly, as they predicted they would be. They discovered that they were. However, they also discovered that there was another factor that was even more important than relative readability: if the students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled to read both the poorly written and the well-written passage. This became particularly clear while Hirsch was running tests at the J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Virginia. The community college students did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War. Hirsch observed that these students lacked "cultural literacy". They had adequate decoding skills for reading, but they began to struggle when they lacked relevant background knowledge.
Cultural Literacy
Hirsch was dismayed that community college students, raised in Virginia, where much of the Civil War was fought, had not heard of Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate States Army, or Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union Army, or the roles these men played in the American Civil War. He began to push for the teaching of cultural literacy in grades K–12, especially K–8. His main objective, as he has frequently noted, was to help disadvantaged students attain cultural literacy and improve their reading comprehension.
In a 1981 presentation to the Modern Language Association, Hirsch introduced his theory on the connection between literacy in general and cultural literacy. A version of his MLA paper was published in 1983 as an article, "Cultural Literacy," in The American Scholar.
In 1983, the Exxon Education Foundation provided support for further research. With this funding, Hirsch set up a team that began to compile lists of terms that "culturally literate" people know but young people and disadvantaged people may need to learn. This would become the appendix of his 1987 book, an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts", representing the "necessary minimum of American general knowledge".
In 1986, Hirsch established the non-profit Cultural Literacy Foundation, with a goal of developing a fact-rich core curriculum and piloting it in selected elementary schools.
In 1987, Hirsch's Cultural Literacy appeared. The book became a national best-seller, rising to #2 on the non-fiction New York Times Best Seller list. Hirsch's book was often reviewed with and discussed in tandem with another education book published at roughly the same time, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. These two books convinced many readers that there were problems with American education. Hirsch's book "spurred a growing movement for prescriptive cultural literacy and standards in general." This resulted in a recommendation by the United States Department of Education that "cultural literacy should inform the content of the American educational system."
Hirsch has distanced himself from Bloom's book, saying that "That was just bad luck ... Allan Bloom really was an elitist."
In 1988, Hirsch co-authored the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy with Joseph Kett and James Trefil. In 1989, Hirsch was the editor of A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. In 1991, Hirsch and his colleagues issued What Your First Grader Needs to Know, the first in the popular Core Knowledge series.
One early supporter of the Core Knowledge movement was Columbia University's Diane Ravitch, an education historian. Against the backdrop of the release of a scathing report on education in the United States—A Nation at Risk—Ravitch encouraged Hirsch to publish Cultural Literacy as a non-fiction book in 1987. The book included an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts" every American should know to be culturally literate.By the time her 2016, reprint of her best-selling book was published, Ravitch had become disillusioned with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Common Core initiative that had produced presented a "comprehensive, coherent sequence of thematic curriculum units connecting the skills outlined in the CCSS with suggested student objectives, texts, activities, and much more (Schneider 2019) becoming disillusioned by the Gates’-funded Common Core. She said the "fundamental error of the Common Core standards is that they were written by a small group of people without the involvement of classroom teachers and scholars in the respective fields. They were written with remarkable speed but without any public review process. There were no means by which to revise them after they were published. States could add up to 15 percent additional content, but could subtract or change nothing. It was a missed opportunity to do it right. The toxicity of the Common Core standards persuaded me that it is fruitless to rely on national curriculum standards as a solution to education problems."