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

“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

“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

“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

“To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

“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

“America had no official national curriculum, but it had the equivalent: a benign conspiracy among the writers of schoolbooks to ensure that all students would learn many of the same facts, myths, and values and so grow to be competent, loyal Americans.1”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“A good general education in the early grades is the necessary foundation for citizenship, literacy, effective use of computers, and, in the new economic era, for speedy and successful job retraining.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“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

“This decline in reading ability necessarily entails a decline in general knowledge, because by the twelfth grade, general knowledge is the main factor determining a student’s level of reading comprehension.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“Although I reject the education world’s antipathy to a specific, grade-by-grade subject-matter curriculum, I praise its emphasis on humane teaching methods. Accommodation of the two views is possible if partisan caricatures recede. But accommodation is not my main theme.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

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

“The elementary school has a special place in this great political experiment because it is the institution that prepares children to participate effectively in the common public sphere.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“in 1893,”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“In 1852 Massachusetts became the first state to make the common school compulsory for all children,”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“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

“the early grades were to have a common core curriculum that would foster patriotism, solidarity, and civic peace”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any piece of writing addressed to the general reader”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know

“A lack of knowledge, both civic and general, is the most significant deficit in most American students’ education.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“Moreover, because the assumed knowledge required for reading and writing tends to be long lasting and intergenerational, much of that content would have to be traditional.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“the idea of the American common school. The center of its emphasis was to be common knowledge, virtue, skill, and an allegiance to the larger community shared by all children no matter what their origin.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“If uncontrolled, these hostile factions would subvert the common good, breed demagogues, and finally turn the Republic into a military dictatorship, just as in ancient Rome.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“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

“in 1812 New York State passed the Common School Act, providing the basis for a statewide system of public elementary schools.6”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools

“The reason that our eighteenth-century founders and their nineteenth-century successors believed schools were crucial to the American future was not only that the schools would make students technically competent. That aim was important, but their main worry was whether the Republic would survive at all.”
― E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools