E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., born in 1928, American author and educator, born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Cornell and Yale universities. Hirsch taught at Yale (1957-66) and then, as professor of English, at the University of Virginia from 1972. His early books include Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism (1960), Innocence and Experience (1964), Validity in Interpretation (1967), The Aims of Interpretation (1976), and The Philosophy of Composition (1981).

Hirsch sparked debate and controversy with his 1987 best-seller, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, in which he tried to establish the common stock of information shared by literate Americans in the late 20th century. His list of “What Literate Americans Know” grew into A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our Children Need to Know (1988), which focused on 2000 things grade-school students should know. It also offered criteria for determining what constitutes common knowledge: information must fall between specialized and generalized; it must be able to be referenced without needing a definition; and it must be of lasting significance. Hirsch argued that problems of learning and literacy could be solved by teaching a body of shared pieces of information that form the basis of communicating and thinking. He extended his program of a national core curriculum to the elementary-school level in What Your First Grader Needs to Know (1991), What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (1991), What Your Third Grader Needs to Know (1992), and What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know (1992), the first four volumes in a projected six-textbook series.