The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Book Overview

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the best-selling Cultural Literacy and our most insightful thinker on what schools teach, offers an urgent solution to the shocking national decline in children's reading... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618872256
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Harvest
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

for j dykstra

i have not read this book but i wanted to answer another reviewers question. dr hirsch also wrot cultural literacy what every american needs to know n which he details his ideas for an appropriate curriculum.

Obvious and common sense solutions

I am an immigrant to the US and I agree that America has serious problems with its educational system. According to the NAEP, most of America's children are not proficient in reading, math or science. I remember reading somewhere that Massachussetts was number 1 in reading even though only 43 percent of kids were proficient. American schools aren't just failing the poor. They are failing kids from all economic backgrounds. Even many high achieving students are poorly educated when compared to their peers in other nations. I have been bewildered by the failure of American education. With two children of my own, I wanted to find out what the problem is. Unfortunately, a lot of books about the failures of education are written by people on the right. Many of these books have an anti-public education perspective. But public education works well in many countries, so government run schools is not the problem. Books like "Smart Kids, Bad Schools" have interesting ideas but their fixes definitely won't solve the overall problem. When I read this book, I knew I had the answer. Hirsch's views are common sense and are based on the kinds of things that work in other countries and in many private and charter schools. I was educated the way Hirsch suggests. I started school at 4 and learned to read and write. At 6, I learned several subjects, including geography, history and science using the coherent and cumulative approach Hirsch suggests. Hirsch says that the problem in this country is not that kids aren't learning content. He says the problem is that it is not coherent and cumulative. He says that there is no standard curriculum, so students are often reading the same books or learning the same concepts in multiple grades. Hirsch makes the point that kids will never be able to read well without the background knowledge that is assumed by the text. Rather than teaching background knowledge schools are instead teaching "comprehension strategies," such as finding the main idea, predicting, inferencing and other nonsense. Anyone with common sense would know that this can never work. If you have no background knowledge in astrophysics, all the comprehension strategies in the world won't help you understand an astrophysics text. Hirsch says that the sooner you start teaching this background knowledge the better. Years of cumulative study in a wide variety of subjects will give kids much of the background knowledge they will need. Instead schools give children reading assignments that either cover things they already know (such as going to school, the playground, etc.) Or they introduce content in a piecemeal way. So, children don't build up a strong understanding of a topic and soon forget it. Hirsch says that in other countries, most children are at a similar level by 4th grade. In America, variances in children's abilities increase the longer they are in school. Teachers are left with the almost impossible task of teaching children that run the spectr

Important work

The reason I gave this book four stars is that despite the short length, it is a fairly dense book that dangles captivating ideas without fleshing them out clearly until the very end. You keep getting the feeling you know what the author is getting at, but he never gets to the details. Specifically, it seems as though he is never going to tell just what the common knowledge every student should have actually is. In spite of this, it is a worthwhile treatise on problems in education, and specifically the area of reading competency. Everyone, including parents and teachers, suspects that there is a problem with No Child Left Behind and similar standards in education. Hirsch's book suggests one possible way of looking at it. He claims that the stated goals are actually incongruent with what they are testing. Specifically, he points out that reading comprehension is basically a function of background knowledge, but that reading tests often attempt to test generic skills such as comprehension and identification of main ideas, sequence, intent, and the like. His solution is to advocate a standardized curriculum nationwide, grade by grade. He points out that by teaching a standard set of background information, we could avoid many problems that students experience when moving from school to school, and we could level the playing field between students who come in with a lot of prior knowledge and those that do not. He seems to admit, in a roundabout way, that such findings do not mesh well with current ideas on pedagogy and may be difficult to institute because they fall into the realm of unthinkable for cultural reasons.

A must for Educators.

I like his ideas and realliy think Hirsch is on to something with this and his other writings. As a teacher I see the education establishment unwilling to make reforms it needs to and Hirsch is at least offering ideas.

To Me, No One Has Made a Valid Rebuttal to Hirsch Yet.

I have taught in elementary classrooms for 18 years, and was a substitute for 3 or 4 years prior to that. Having read various books about the problems in our public schools, I can say that, in my opinion, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has his fingers exactly on the pulse of what is wrong. I have never heard a convincing SCIENTIFIC refutation of his theories instead of refutations based on idealogy and political leanings (in other words, the way that "the powers that be" in education THINK it should be as opposed to the way it really IS!). I can say from experience that my students absolutely detest reading. It is hard work, and they have not been given the background knowledge they need which Hirsch espouses (or the work ethic) to comprehend what they are reading. Instead, I am forced to teach them "strategies" so thay supposedly can "decode" the meaning of the passage, regardless of whether the passage is about the Vietnam War or elephants in India. This will supposedly help my school score high on the state test and assure me a job next year. Now, I firmly believe that these strategies can help, but only if the background knowledge that the literate people within our society who HAVE a good education (and who often are in charge of hiring people in the real world) say our children must have in order to function effectively, is being taught at the same time. Guess what? It's not! (as Hirsch so clearly points out.) This is not an easy read, but any teacher, administrator, school board member, or concerned parent worried about their childrens' education who is worth their salt owes it to themselves to be aware of Hirsch's books, including this one. In my opinion, there's no one better equipped to solve the public education problem in our country, and to do it SCIENTIFICALLY instead of with all sorts of ridiculous POLITICALLY CORRECT solutions that are doomed to failure before they even get off the ground, than Mr. Hirsch.