“The reason we are having so many issues in the US,” states ED Hirsch, emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, “is that there isn’t that commonality of culture, and for any human tribe to stick together they need that commonality.”

For Hirsch, the lack of that commonality - causing huge political rifts and leading to protests such as the Black Lives Matter movement - is down to a failure of education.

It’s a position he has repeated often since he published his book Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know, in 1987. And it is a position that has made him hugely influential in the US, but also in UK education (schools minister Nick Gibb is arguably his biggest fan). 

Now in his nineties, it is a message he feels is still not getting through and that has led to the publishing of his new book on 11 September, called How to Educate a Citizen. 

Watch the interview with ED Hirsch

“The aim of democratic schooling is to erase class and increase equity,” he tells the latest episode of the Tes Podagogy podcast. “[To achieve that end result] everyone has to understand what [other] people mean.

“To understand language, you have to have a lot of unstated knowledge that can disambiguate it and amplify it so you can understand what the writer meant.”

Pedagogy problems

He believes the US schooling system, along with other systems around the world, consistently fails to educate children in a way that enables equal access to that “shared knowledge” that leads to shared understanding.

He says that right from the early years, children should be taught a coherent, content- (rather than skills-) based curriculum that builds knowledge cumulatively, and that enables every child in a classroom to have equal access to the knowledge a teacher is passing on.  

You can listen to the interview on the player below

“The whole reason for a cumulative curriculum is not only that knowledge builds on knowledge, but [also] that the understanding of speech builds on the knowledge you have, and so if everyone in the classroom is able to understand the speech in the classroom then everyone can learn,” he explains.

“If some children are excluded from that understanding then you are simply exacerbating class differences. That’s where the idea of commonality and cumulativeness in the curriculum is so important - it builds a speech community. A speech community is a group of people who understand each other. If a classroom is not built into a speech community then you are leaving some kids out.”

Knowledge choices

What - or rather whose - knowledge should be included, though?

One of the criticisms Hirsch has faced across his career is that his approach leads to maintenance of the existing power structures - that children are taught a white, elitist body of knowledge that excludes anyone not already in that elite, white group of people. Hirsch says he is advocating nothing of the sort.

“Should there be more black culture in the curriculum? I think everyone should agree with that,” he explains. “We have to decide in the US…are we making a national culture that everybody joins? And you can have more than one culture - one does not exclude the other - but what the schools of a nation have to do is create an America culture.”

A common understanding 

Essentially, for Hirsch, the importance is that every child is taught the same thing and that everyone buys into that content as a common language of understanding. What that shared knowledge is seems to be less important than the fact it is shared. If you get that shared understanding - that common language of culture - then you get equity and peace.

Where he is more directive is on pedagogy. For example, he is very critical of personalisation and differentiation.

“I don’t think we should talk about differentiation or personalisation, and use instead accommodation…The idea of accommodation is that everyone is getting the same message but good teaching is about detecting where a child is not getting the point and you find ways of communicating it [another way] but the message is the same.”

Discovery learning

He is also very against what he calls “discovery” forms of pedagogy.  

“[They] are saying discovery learning is better than passive learning, as they call it,” he says. “That turns out to be quite fallacious. There is a good deal of work on this issue of overt instructional process versus discovery learning and top cognitive scientists have studied this and they are uniform in saying that these discovery modes don’t work nearly as well as guided instruction.

“I think we have to go with the science. Unless [that is] you can produce really good evidence that discovery modes of learning leave a stronger impression on the mind and greater understanding, but there is no evidence to that.

“It is an intellectual disgrace that our university centres for instructing teachers and our cognitive psych departments in the same universities…[don’t work together]. We should not stand for that any longer.”

The podcast also covers generic skills, Black Lives Matter protests in the US, core knowledge schools and education theory.

You can listen on the player or watch above, or type Tes Podagogy into your podcast platform. To subscribe, follow the instructions at the end of this link. (Apologies that Hirsch’s dogs escaped and started barking near the end of the recording!)