Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

By E. D. Hirsch

The Knowledge Deficit illuminates the real issue in education today -- without an effective curriculum, American students are losing the global education race. In this persuasive book, the esteemed education critic, activist, and best-selling author E.D. Hirsch, Jr., shows that although schools are teaching the mechanics of reading, they fail to convey the knowledge needed for the more complex and essential skill of reading comprehension. Hirsch corrects popular misconceptions about hot issues in education, such as standardized testing, and takes to task educators' claims that they are powerless to overcome class differences. Ultimately, this essential book gives parents and teachers specific tools for enhancing children's abilities to fully understand what they read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780547346960

E. D. Hirsch

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several acclaimed books on education, including the New York Times bestseller Cultural Literacy, The Schools We Need, The Knowledge Deficit, The Making of Americans, and Why Knowledge Matters. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia.

Reviews for Knowledge Deficit

[kanst-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book changed how I approach education.I began this book agreeing with some of Hirsch's precepts, and vehemently disagreeing with others. For instance, I have always opposed the "national curriculum" approach, and supported the ideal of each local school district being a world unto itself and having a duty to reflect the beliefs of the local community. E.D. Hirsch, in this book, lays out, step-by-step, how this is at best inefficient, and shows how it is children from low-income families that will disproportionately pay the price under such a system. Reading this book clarified something for me I couldn't previously explain: my school experience was extremely fragmented and repetitive, and for much of those years I am convinced I learned nothing at all in class, yet I always scored very highly on all standardized tests and comprehension was never what I struggled with in school. I may not have had a great school experience, but I was raised in a highly-literate middle-class home, and this environment was able to provide the education school did not. And what I saw in school, just as Hirsch predicted, is my less-fortunate peers falling further and further behind and struggling to understand even simple passages that I thought were boringly simple. My educational successes do not reflect how great our current educational approach is, it shows only that I succeeded in spite of the monumental waste of time and resources. Many others did not. I strongly recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn more about the effectiveness of these different "educational approaches" found in schools today.

[mljousma · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very good book and validation for any parent whose pulled their children out of the failing school systems.

[mrtall_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an admirable and brave little book.E D Hirsch is an eminent educational thinker and writer, yet his tone is calm and unassuming, especially since he's confronting the US educational establishment head-on and telling them they're engaged in a vast educational malpractice, and that they need to repent their ways and see the light. Hirsch focuses on reading instruction here, but his theme is the same as it's been in several of his books (all of which I recommend): content matters. But instead of teaching children the traditional content they need to know to be literate, educated adults, the education system in the USA is dominated by two schools of thought that have useful contributions to make, but that are treated as dogma by today's 'progressive' ed profs and by many school administrators and teachers. The culprits? Naturalism (i.e. the belief that academic learning such as reading and arithmetic unfolds and grows as naturally in children as their ability to speak) and Formalism (the assumption that reading is a discrete 'skill' that can be taught via content-neutral algorithms and then transferred to any kind of material without any loss of efficacy.Hirsch believes reality is much messier than the great mass of educational romantics; that is, reading comprehension is always inextricably bound up in not only the words that make up a reading passage, but also the tacit, background knowledge all writers must assume their readers already hold. That is, no text is fully self-explicating. Achieving full reading effectiveness therefore requires the reader to hold a great deal of actual knowledge, which Hirsch has identified in his 'core knowledge' books and school programs.All of this may seem commonsensical to ordinary people, but to the educational establishment Hirsch is a true revolutionary. Or maybe he's a closet reactionary, since although he professes to be politically liberal, his educational vision is profoundly traditionalist. Hirsh's greatest strength, however, is that he's so constructive. Criticizing 'progressive' educational philosophy and practices is fish-in-the-barrel stuff. Hirsch does the necessary take-down, but he then goes on to propose a fully-worked-out plan for doing things better.I highly recommend this compact, readable introduction to this important thinker's body of work.