Restating the Obvious: A review of How to Educate a Citizen

“I think E.D. Hirsch, [Jr.] embodies Orwell's observation: ‘We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.’” 

This was the observation of an online commentator about the education reformer’s significance. And indeed, much of what Hirsch has accomplished over his 30-plus-year career—and certainly what he achieves in his new (and sadly, he says, last) book, How to Educate a Citizen (Harper Books, 2020)—is to restate the obvious. 

Hirsch’s simple equation goes something like this: We need shared literacy, shared knowledge, and common knowledge to have a properly functioning and maximally inclusive society. And the most effective way of making sure that our youngest members of society—our children—learn and then incorporate that shared knowledge is through school. 

“No child can find individual self-fulfillment in a modern society while lacking in social competence, including effective speaking, reading and writing, all of which are dependent on shared knowledge,” Hirsch writes. “Real individualism and independence of thought comes after cognitive and linguistic mastery—not before.” 

The good news is that the American experiment proved that this seemingly simple formula can work. First, the Founders adopted the Enlightenment idea that a child’s mind starts out as a blank slate onto which parents, community, and society can imprint the basics of identity, character, and loyalty. “A nation, to become a people, needs to insist on creating a public sphere with shared knowledge that unifies its population and enables its members to work together, communicate effectively with one another, and fell loyalty to one another,” Hirsch explains.

The utility of public schooling, or a shared school curriculum for all children, is that if you have a population from a variety of countries, speaking a variety of languages, worshipping differently, and each with their own traditions and customs, as is the case in the United States, then spreading the acceptance of shared concepts and values is most efficiently done through schools. “Our founders believed,” Hirsch argues, “that the common school had a key role to play toward the goal of achieving unity in the federal system. It was to be the instrument that binds us together in civic duty toward the good of the whole, fostering the ‘general welfare’.”

The result, Hirsch explains, is that for our first century and a half, “we succeeded in creating a united citizenry based on a common language and common schooling.” The bad news is that a different idea took over from this conception of children as blank slates whose minds should be filled with the basic literacy that can unite disparate people into one nation. It was replaced by the notion that children could learn best by fostering an open, “natural” environment, where kids decide what they are interested in learning. The theory is that reading and writing skills can emerge from the child’s own interests and affinities rather than being dictated by a specific curriculum. It’s the goal that matters, not the content used to achieve it. 

Hirsch traces how the theory went even further than just changing how kids are supposed to be taught. He shows that education theorists of the early 20^th century then went on to transform schools so that teachers were trained to follow the new dogma of nature over nurture.  “[O]ur education schools,” he explains, "often support a wrong theory about ….how children should be taught and what children should be taught. Both of those fundamental errors stem from the faith that, even at the cultural level, nature is providential, that it is God’s agent and therefore benign.” 

Hirsch shows how most public school—because the administrators and teachers who populate them were trained this way—perpetuate a mistaken and false belief system, developed decades ago, that says in order to succeed, classrooms should be child-centric and “based on the concept that education is partly a matter of drawing out the child’s inborn nature.”

Hirsch provides a series of interviews with parents and teachers who complain that this system just isn’t working. Based on their own anecdotal experiences, kids don’t get a coherent base of knowledge, which is built up over years to form the basic literacy and common wisdom necessary to form a united people.  The outcome? According to Hirsch: “[T]he loss of a shared knowledge base across the nation that would otherwise enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions at the local and national level.”

The students most hurt by this methodological shift, Hirsch argues, are disadvantaged and minority kids who enter school without the background in common language and cultural understanding to thrive in this child-centered environment. “Possessing less knowledge of the print culture, they will not reliably understand the language of the classroom,” he says. Inevitably, the gap between disadvantaged students and their peers will then increase rather than decrease over time. 

Honestly, reading this book just before the start of this uncertain and abnormal school year, where many kids in some parts of the country are not even returning to the classroom to be educated at all, I found myself agreeing with Hirsch’s warning about the dangers of our nation’s current disunity. But I was also skeptical about how widespread his educational theory really is, particularly for kids in private or charter schools, like my children. That is, until I got an email from my son’s second-grade teacher. 

The teacher did not discuss mastery of basic subjects. There was nothing about the content for the year. There was also nothing about what students might learn that would build on their knowledgebase from first grade and absolutely nothing about his identity as an American. Instead, there was a lot about how the instructor was going to help my son decide what subjects he’d spend time on because he would have the opportunity to choose the material. When I tried to gently push the teacher to tell me what I could expect in terms of required content, I was pleasantly diverted away from the notion of standards. 

At least, I was gratified to learn that the kids will say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. In this small way, our boy will receive some sense of connection to the country where he is blessed to live. By the way, Hirsch has definite opinions about the terrible impact of not teaching allegiance to our children. “We don’t understand one another,” he writes, “we don’t trust one another; we don’t like one another.” 

Ahead of a presidential election, it is hard to find the optimism to hope for better. Hirsch’s attempt is especially important in our current environment, since his restating the obvious at least clarifies the challenge and opportunity for parents. And maybe the upending of the regular school year, a time when so many kids aren’t even allowed into their school buildings, will serve as an inflection point in our nation’s education history. The necessity for school choice is more obvious to more parents than ever before. And meanwhile, public education can no longer be taken for granted or left alone to fail our children for another generation. Parents have their best opportunity in decades to see behind the curtain of what has been happening at their kids’ school and decide for themselves whether or not to make a change. Hirsch certainly gives us a roadmap for where we should be headed. The challenge is taking up his cause and implementing it. 

Abby W. Schachter, a research fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University, is the author of “No Child Left Alone: Getting the government out of parenting.”