The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them.

• Author: Ramos, Dante

By E.D. Hirsch Doublesday, $24.95

E.D. Hirsch Jr., was briefly famous in 1987, but mostly due to bad timing. In his book Cultural Literacy, the University of Virginia professor of English argued that most American adults have too little factual knowledge about history, literature, science, and other fields to sustain an intelligent national discourse. But many media commentators ignored the argument and merely compiled cutesy, stump-you quizzes from Cultural Literacy's appendix, a list of important names and terms Hirsch believes all Americans should be able to identify. It was easy to perceive him less as a would-be education reformer than as an apologist for the 1980s trivia-game fad.

Hirsch's ideas deserve better treatment. In his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, he again asserts that general factual knowledge is a vital part of learning. He also believes this factual knowledge should be enshrined in specific nationwide educational standards. Yet for decades, progressive-minded education professors have urged teachers in grades K-12 to eschew facts--say, the roles of the major figures in the French Revolution--in favor of critical-thinking skills, even though considerable psychological research and the performance of American students in international comparisons suggest that this approach is ineffective. Certainly Hirsch is making a bold claim: that most education researchers are simply wrong about how children learn, just as Marxists were simply wrong about the way economies work. But his analysis is fascinating, and his conclusions are often compelling.

Many education writers and researchers would hardly be bothered by the suggestion that schools don't teach facts anymore. "The blowout of potential information on the information superhighway is an indication of the implausibility of a factoid-based approach to curriculum," one educator declared in a telling letter to The Washington Post. "Students have to be challenged to articulate the questions that need attention in the solution of problems.... Students don't need to be drilled in isolated facts; they need the intellectual space to develop skills for asking pertinent questions and for knowing where and how to find the needed data" Most contemporary education researchers believe rigid content requirements effectively require the stupefying repetition of often irrelevant data, impede children's acquisition of cognitive skills, and prevent teachers from...