E.D. Hirsch Jr. > Quotes

“I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.”
― E.D. Hirsch

“Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school?

"If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five—they are most likely to be poor or minority students—are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation.”
― E.D. Hirsch

“The distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place.”
― E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

“Schemata are our necessary instruments for making the surfaces of what we read connect significantly with the background knowledge that is wittheld from immediate conciousness by the limits of short-term memory.”
― E. D. Hirsch, Jr., New First Dictionary Of Cultural Literacy

“Differences in reading ability between five-year olds and eight-year olds are caused primarily by the older children's possessing more knowledge, not by the differences in their memory capacities, reasoning abilities, or control of eye movements.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copybooks, and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them

“There are no significant shortcuts to intellectual competence. Domain-specific knowledge and long practice are essential to consolidating a skill in long-term memory. Neither computers nor general critical-thinking techniques can circumvent those arduous requirements.”
― E.D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories

“systematic approach to knowledge building is more productive than an arbitrary skills approach with unspecified topics.31”
― E.D. Hirsch, Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories

“If plain run is good enough for I, you, we, they, why isn't it good enough for he, she, it? Because we have no choice in the matter. The decision was made by those who fixed our grammar at a certain stage of its evolution, and their decision will probably stand forever.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

“Plato said that stories are the most important part of early education and advised parents and teachers to take great care in choosing the right stories: “Let them fashion the mind with such tales even more fondly than they mold the body.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated): Fundamentals of a Good Second-Grade Education

“Learning builds on learning: children (and adults) gain new knowledge only by augmenting what they already know.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated): Fundamentals of a Good Second-Grade Education

“Deep knowledge and practice are essential.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated): Fundamentals of a Good Second-Grade Education

“If we want our children to be broadly competent readers, thinkers, and problem solvers, they must have a rich, broad store of background knowledge to call upon, enabling them to flex those mental muscles.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated): Fundamentals of a Good Second-Grade Education

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― E.D. Hirsch Jr., What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know: Preparing Your Child for a Lifetime of Learning