40 CHAPTER 2 | FRom REAding As A WRiTER To WRiTing As A REAdERindependent school districts. We have viewed this dispersion of educational
authority as an insurmountable obstacle to altering the fragmentation of the
school curriculum even when we have questioned that fragmentation. We have
permitted school policies that have shrunk the body of information that Ameri-
cans share and these policies have caused our national literacy to decline.
This is an interesting argument when interpreted in a conservative
political context. While calling for greater local control, Hirsch and
other conservatives call for a curriculum that is controlled not at the
state and local level, but at the national level by the federal government.
Putting contradictions like this aside, the question arises as to
whether or not Hirsch even has a viable curriculum. In an early review
of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, Hazel Whitman Hertzberg criticized the
book and its list of 5,000 things every American needs to know for its
fragmentation. As she explained:
Hirsch’s remedy for curricular fragmentation looks suspiciously like more
fragmentation. Outside of the dubious claim that his list represents what lit-
erate people know, there is nothing that holds it together besides its arrange-
ment in alphabetical order. Subject-matter organization is ignored. It is not
hard to imagine how Hirsch’s proposal would have been greeted by educa-
tional neoconservatives had it been made by one of those professors of educa-
tion who he charges are responsible for the current state of cultural illiteracy.
Hertzberg wonders what Hirsch’s “hodgepodge of miscellaneous, arbi-
trary, and often trivial information” would look like if it were put into a
coherent curriculum.
In 1988 Hirsch did in fact establish the Core Knowledge Foundation,
which had as its purpose the design of a national curriculum. Called the
“Core Knowledge Sequence,” the sequence offered a curriculum in six
content areas: history, geography, mathematics, science, language arts,
and fine arts. Hirsch’s curriculum was intended to represent approxi-
mately half of the total curriculum for K–6 schools. Subsequent cur-
riculum revisions include a curriculum for grades seven and eight as
well as one at the preschool level.
Several hundred schools across the United States currently use
Hirsch’s model. A national conference is held each year, which draws
several thousand people. In books like What Your First Grader Needs to
Know (1991) as well as A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Our
Children Need to Know (1989) and The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
(1993), along with the Core Knowledge Sequence, one finds a fairly con-
servative but generally useful curriculum that conforms to much of the
content already found in local school systems around the country.
Hirsch seems not to recognize that there indeed is a national curricu-
lum, one whose standards are set by local communities through their
acceptance and rejection of textbooks and by national accreditation
groups ranging from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
to the National Council for Social Studies Teachers and the National234502_GRE_5344_Ch2_029_054.indd 40 11/19/14 4:03 PM