CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — E.D. Hirsch Jr. once was the boogeyman of public education. Although conservatives embraced him, liberals--meaning most of the mainstream education world--considered him a Neanderthal, a pedagogue, an elitist.
They bashed his 1987 book, "Cultural Literacy," as a Eurocentric tract that would have students reading about dead white males and conjugating verbs in Latin. They sneered at his next bestseller, the "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy," as a boon mainly for enthusiasts of Trivial Pursuit.
They feared that if he had his way, the "open" classroom would revert to its dreary former self, with bolted-down desks and chairs and students performing mind-numbing memory drills.
The Harvard Educational Review lambasted "Cultural Literacy" as "one of the most elaborate conservative educational manifestoes" in years.
A decade later?
Well, Hirsch was the star of a recent forum at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, swarmed by fans wanting him to sign his latest book. Then he was feted at the faculty club.
But that was nothing compared to the reception a few miles away at the Morse School, one of 350 schools around the country following his grade-by-grade prescription for what children should learn. Here, hand-painted banners trumpeted his name. Here, grateful teachers and parents offered juice and homemade bread. And here, gaggles of exuberant fourth-graders begged for his autograph as if he were Pluto in Disneyland.
"I regard him as a hero--an intellectual hero," said John Kelleher, a Morse parent who bucked the liberal tendencies of the Cambridge community to bring Hirsch's curriculum to this once-downtrodden public school.
What gives?
Ten years and several cultural wars later, Hirsch, a balding, 68-year-old English professor from Virginia, has emerged as an intellectual guru of education reform.
He has become a force by standing firm on two points he first made in 1987: that there is a core of knowledge every American must learn to succeed in school and function responsibly in our democracy; and that a wrongheaded educational theory called progressivism--teachers should be attuned to the social and emotional needs of children and should nurture their creativity--has kept schools from teaching that essential knowledge.
With talk of national academic standards permeating discussions of how to fix America's schools, Hirsch's message resounds today not as a right-wing rebuke but as common sense, educationally and politically correct.
