E.D. Hirsch Jr. Quotes

Differences in reading ability between five-year olds and eight-year olds are caused primarily by the older children's possessing more knowledge, not by the differences in their memory capacities, reasoning abilities, or control of eye movements.

The distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place.

Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school?

"If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five - they are most likely to be poor or minority students - are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation.

The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American education.

I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.