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Hirsch is the founder and chairman of the non-profit [[Core Knowledge Foundation]], which publishes and periodically updates the Core Knowledge Sequence, a set of unusually detailed curriculum guidelines for Pre-K through 8th grade.
In 1991, Hirsch and the Core Knowledge Foundation put out ''What Your First Grader Needs to Know'', the first volume in what is popularly known as "the Core Knowledge Series."<ref group="HirschPublications">{{cite book | last=Hirsch | first=E. D.
Before turning to education, Hirsch wrote on English literature and theory of interpretation (''[[hermeneutics]]''). His book ''Validity in Interpretation'' (1967) is considered an important contribution to [[hermeneutics]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Irvin|first=Sherri|date=11 September 2021|title=Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning|journal=Philosophy Compass |volume=4 |pages=287–291 |doi=10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00180.x |doi-access=free}}</ref> In it, Hirsch argues for intentionalism—the idea that the reader's goal should be to recover the author's meaning.<ref name="Klausen_2017">{{cite journal|last=Klausen|first=Søren Harnow|date=April 2017|title=Levels of Literary Meaning|journal=Philosophy and Literature|volume=41|issn=0190-0013|number=1}}</ref><ref group="HirschPublications">{{cite book | last=Hirsch | first=E. D.
== Early life and education ==
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From 1956 to 1966, Hirsch taught in the English Department at Yale University.<ref name=":0" /> During this time most of his academic work concerned the English Romantic poets.
Hirsch's first book, ''Wordsworth and Schelling'', was a revision of his doctoral dissertation. In the book, he explicates Wordsworth's philosophic ideas and poems by juxtaposing them with the ideas of the German philosopher [[Friedrich Schelling]] .<ref group="HirschPublications">{{cite book | last=Hirsch | first=E. D.
In 1964, Hirsch published his second book, ''Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake''. In this book Hirsch took issue with "systematic" critics of Blake's work, including [[Northrop Frye]] and [[Harold Bloom]]. Hirsch argued that Blake's ideas and outlook changed radically over time and that early works like ''The Songs of Innocence'' do not express the same worldview as later works like ''The Songs of Experience''.<ref group="HirschPublications">{{cite book | last=Hirsch
==UVA and Hermeneutics==
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==Composition and Theory of Writing==
In the early 1970s Hirsch began working on the theory of writing and composition, publishing several articles and a book, ''The Philosophy of Composition'' (1977). The central concept in this book is the idea of "relative readability." One piece of writing is more readable, in terms of relative readability, than another if it conveys the same meaning but is easier to read and is read more quickly than the alternative passage. ''The Philosophy of Composition'' was widely reviewed and generated a lot of discussion in composition circles for several years, but Hirsch's work in this area is no longer widely discussed.<ref>{{cite
In the late 1970s, Hirsch and some colleagues at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments on relative readability. Participants in the experiments were assigned either a well written passage or a poorly written (stylistically degraded) version of the same passage. Hirsch and his colleagues recorded reading time to determine whether the well written passages were in fact read more quickly, as they predicted they would be. They discovered that they were. However, they also discovered that there was another factor that was even more important than relative readability: if the students lacked crucial background knowledge, they struggled to read both the poorly written and the well written passage. This became particularly clear while Hirsch was running tests at a Virginia community college. The students at the community college did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War. Hirsch observed that these students lacked "cultural literacy". They had adequate decoding skills for reading, but they began to struggle when they lacked relevant background knowledge.<ref name="NYT_Hitchens_19900513">{{Cite news|last=Hitchens|first=Christopher|date=May 13, 1990|title=Why we don't know what we don't know just ask E. D. Hirsch|work=The New York Times|location=Charlottesville, Virginia|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/13/magazine/why-we-don-t-know-what-we-don-t-know-just-ask-ed-hirsch.html|access-date=April 1, 2021|issn=0362-4331}}</ref><ref group="HirschPublications">{{Cite journal | last=Hirsch | first=E. D. | date=1983 | title=Cultural literacy |
== Cultural Literacy ==
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In 1988, Hirsch co-authored the ''Dictionary of Cultural Literacy'' with Joseph Kett and James Trefil.<ref name="Hirsch_1983" group="HirschPublications">{{Cite book| publisher = Houghton Mifflin| isbn = 978-0-395-43748-3| last1 = Hirsch| first1 = Eric Donald| last2 = Kett| first2 = Joseph F.| last3 = Trefil| first3 = James S.| title = The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy| date = 1988}}</ref> In 1989, Hirsch was the editor of ''A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. In 1991, Hirsch and his colleagues issued ''What Your First Grader Needs to Know'', the first in the popular Core Knowledge series.
One early supporter of the Core Knowledge movement was [[Columbia University]]'s [[Diane Ravitch]], an education historian.<ref name="Schneider_20191006">{{cite news |title=A Great Minds (Common Core, Inc.) History: Eureka Math, Wit & Wisdom, and More. |last=Schneider |first=Mercedes |date=October 6, 2019}}</ref> Against the backdrop of the release of a scathing report on education in the United States—''A Nation at Risk''—Ravitch encouraged Hirsch to publish ''Cultural Literacy'' as a non-fiction book in 1987.<ref name="Hirsch_1987" group="HirschPublications">{{Cite book| isbn = 978-0-394-75843-5| last = Hirsch| first = Eric Donald| title = Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know| date = 1987| publisher = Knopf Doubleday Publishing}}</ref> The book included an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts" every American should know in order to be culturally literate.<ref name="theatlantic_Liu_20150703">{{Cite news| last = Liu| first = Eric| title = The 10 Things That Every American Should Know |date=July 3, 2015| work = The Atlantic| access-date = March 31, 2021| url = https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/what-every-american-should-know/397334/}}</ref><ref name="E.D. Hirsch Jr"/><ref group="Notes">By the time her 2016, reprint of her best-selling book was published, Ravitch had become disillusioned with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's [[Common Core State Standards Initiative|Common Core]] initiative that had produced presented a "comprehensive, coherent sequence of thematic curriculum units connecting the skills outlined in the CCSS with suggested student objectives, texts, activities, and much more (Schneider 2019) becoming disillusioned by the Gates’-funded [[Common Core State Standards Initiative|Common Core]]. She said the "fundamental error of the Common Core standards is that they were written by a small group of people without the involvement of classroom teachers and scholars in the respective fields. They were written with remarkable speed but without any public review process. There were no means by which to revise them after they were published. States could add up to 15 percent additional content, but could subtract or change nothing. It was a missed opportunity to do it right. The toxicity of the Common Core standards persuaded me that it is fruitless to rely on national curriculum standards as a solution to education problems."{{cite book|title=The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education |first=Diane |last=Ravitch |year=2016|orig-year=2010|edition=3rd}}</ref><ref name="Politico_Tyre_201409" />
By 1988, Hirsch was featured in the New York Times, as a "self-proclaimed crusade against noneducation" in his role as president of the Cultural Literacy Foundation which was headquartered in Charlottesville. The Foundation monitored the "spread of ignorance and illiteracy in the United States" and made "proposals for remedying it".<ref name="NYT_Hitchens_19900513" />
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=== Reviews of Hirsch's work===
A 1999 ''Baltimore Sun'' article said Hirsch's system had succeeded in "producing educated children" but ignited an "education controversy" which has been "very good for [Hirsch's] business".<ref name="Bowler_19991228"/> Hirsch said that he specifically designed a curriculum that would "place all children on common ground, sharing a common body of knowledge. That's one way to secure civil rights."<ref name="Bowler_19991228">{{Citation | last = Bowler | first = Mike | title = Knowledge, front and center - Curriculum: An English professor's vision has produced educated children -- and an education controversy lasting two decades | newspaper = The Baltimore Sun | date = December 28, 1999 | url = http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-12-28/news/9912280098_1_hirsch-core-knowledge-curriculum | access-date = February 2, 2015}}</ref>
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E. D. Hirsch was first invited to [[Portugal]] in 2004 by the then minister of education David Justino and then participated at two conferences organized by [[Nuno Crato]]. On the occasion, he was interviewed by various media. His points of view were part of the public educational debate developed for a few years after his visit.
Later, his ideas were very influential, namely during the tenure of minister [[Nuno Crato]] (2011–2015) in which the curricula were reorganized and detailed learning outcomes ("metas curriculares") were introduced. These learning outcomes explicitly highlight the essential knowledge students should master and were built in a progressive, systematic, and layered fashion inspired by Hirsch's ideas. Various analysts<ref>{{Cite
== Personal life==
Hirsch was married to Gertrud Erna Winkelsen from 1956 and from 1958 to Mary Monteith Pope until her death in 2015.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Obituary of Mary Pope Hirsch: https://lcnme.com/obituaries/mary-pope-hirsch/</ref> He is currently married to Natasha "Tasha" Tobin.<ref group="HirschPublications">* {{cite book | last=Hirsch | first=E.
He has four children.<ref name=":0" />
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* ''The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools'' (2010)
* ''Why Knowledge Matters'' (2016)
* {{cite book | last=Hirsch | first=E. D. | author-mask=0 | year=2020 | title=How to educate a citizen: The power of shared knowledge to unify a nation | publisher=Harper | isbn=978-0-06-300192-3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yo_CDwAAQBAJ}}
== See also ==
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== Further reading ==
* Aeschliman,
*
*
*
* {{cite web | last
* {{cite web | last
* {{cite magazine | last=Aeschliman
* {{cite book | last=Kohn | first=Alfie | author-link=Alfie Kohn | title=The schools our children deserve: Moving beyond traditional classrooms and "tougher standards" | publisher=Houghton Mifflin | year=1999 | isbn=978-0-618-08345-9 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NXead57GHSwC}}
* {{cite book | last=Provenzo | first=Eugene F. | author-link=Eugene F. Provenzo | title=Critical literacy: What every American ought to know | publisher=Paradigm Publishers | series=Series in critical narratives | year=2005 | isbn=978-1-59451-089-2}}
* {{cite book | last=Macedo | first=Donoldo | year=1994 | title=Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know | publisher=Avalon Publishing | isbn=978-0-8133-2253-7}}
* {{cite
== External links ==
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