The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. - book reviews

By E.D. Hirsch Doublesday, $24.95

E.D. Hirsch Jr., was briefly famous in 1987, but mostly due to bad timing. In his book Cultural Literacy, the University of Virginia professor of English argued that most American adults have too little factual knowledge about history, literature, science, and other fields to sustain an intelligent national discourse. But many media commentators ignored the argument and merely compiled cutesy, stump-you quizzes from Cultural Literacy's appendix, a list of important names and terms Hirsch believes all Americans should be able to identify. It was easy to perceive him less as a would-be education reformer than as an apologist for the 1980s trivia-game fad.

Hirsch's ideas deserve better treatment. In his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, he again asserts that general factual knowledge is a vital part of learning. He also believes this factual knowledge should be enshrined in specific nationwide educational standards. Yet for decades, progressive-minded education professors have urged teachers in grades K-12 to eschew facts--say, the roles of the major figures in the French Revolution--in favor of critical-thinking skills, even though considerable psychological research and the performance of American students in international comparisons suggest that this approach is ineffective. Certainly Hirsch is making a bold claim: that most education researchers are simply wrong about how children learn, just as Marxists were simply wrong about the way economies work. But his analysis is fascinating, and his conclusions are often compelling.

Many education writers and researchers would hardly be bothered by the suggestion that schools don't teach facts anymore. "The blowout of potential information on the information superhighway is an indication of the implausibility of a factoid-based approach to curriculum," one educator declared in a telling letter to The Washington Post. "Students have to be challenged to articulate the questions that need attention in the solution of problems.... Students don't need to be drilled in isolated facts; they need the intellectual space to develop skills for asking pertinent questions and for knowing where and how to find the needed data" Most contemporary education researchers believe rigid content requirements effectively require the stupefying repetition of often irrelevant data, impede children's acquisition of cognitive skills, and prevent teachers from catering to individual students' strengths and needs.

This belief is variously called "progressive," "modern," or "child-centered," and Hirsch cleverly traces its origins to a strain of naturalistic individualism that grew out of the Romantic movement and still pervades American culture To Hirsch, the success of such bestsellers as The Hurried Child proves that Americans are suspicious of artificial interference with the natural development of children. And if the popular notion is that children learn what they need to know when they're good and ready to know it, the idea that children shouldn't be burdened with abstract facts becomes comprehensible. Frequently, other progressive innovations follow, including "hands-on" discovery learning, descriptive report cards without letter grades, the abandonment of "whole-class" instruction, and the postponement of certain mathematics topics until "developmentally appropriate" ages. Progressive theorists believe classroom education should be as lifelike and natural as possible.

But formal education is an inherently artificial process, and the introduction of naturalistic methods may not improve it. In systematic studies of instructional methods, children in progressive classrooms couldn't read or do math as well as children whose teachers taught facts and required considerable repetition and practice, and usually addressed the entire class at once. Discovery learning, for example, is a pleasant but inefficient way to teach traditional academic subjects. Students in an honors geometry class I happened to visit at a well-respected Louisiana public high school spent an hour photographing examples of geometric figures around the school yard. But while the assignment probably did force students to "think critically" about the relationship between geometry and nature, they might have thought much harder by learning in the hoary old way: working through proofs of complex geometrical theorems.

Hirsch is not claiming that the ability to recite obscure dates or definitions should be the goal of education. But he does believe that knowing certain facts is vital to substantive learning. He declares, "The real-life competencies that people need, such as the abilities to read, to write, to communicate, to learn, to analyze, and to grasp and manipulate mathematical symbols, have major components that psychologists have found to be `domain-specific.' this means that an ability to think critically about chess does not translate into an ability to think critically about sailing" It also means that learning can't be painless. Unfortunately, the repetition that educational progressives deride as "drill and kill" is key to mastering most vital skills, including reading, composition, and mathematical computation. "Constantly to create a lifelike,`meaningful context is not the principle that is followed in teaching young children ballet, or piano playing, or downfield blocking, where some admixture of specialized drill and practice is thought to be essential," Hirsch writes.