The Knowledge Deficit by E. D. Hirsch Jr. has an interesting title and tagline. If you feel that American Children need to buckle down and learn more things then this book might be for you.

While it seems as though the book will focus on schools in general, it seems as though it mainly concentrates on reading comprehension. This book does not merely decry the problems inherent in our public school system, it also discusses ways to correct these issues. The problem might be that there are far too many solutions and not one unifying idea. I mean this in general, not in reference to the book itself.

The book is quite short, checking in at under 200 pages. It uses a crisp and lucid style to convey its ideas. It explores some alternatives and discusses the idea of “Natural” Learning, which was somewhat surprising when I read it. I suppose if you think that language is a gift from the heavens rather than an invention of man then you could make such a mistake, but I don’t know.

Other than that, the book was pretty good. ( )

This book changed how I approach education.

I began this book agreeing with some of Hirsch's precepts, and vehemently disagreeing with others. For instance, I have always opposed the "national curriculum" approach, and supported the ideal of each local school district being a world unto itself and having a duty to reflect the beliefs of the local community. E.D. Hirsch, in this book, lays out, step-by-step, how this is at best inefficient, and shows how it is children from low-income families that will disproportionately pay the price under such a system. Reading this book clarified something for me I couldn't previously explain: my school experience was extremely fragmented and repetitive, and for much of those years I am convinced I learned nothing at all in class, yet I always scored very highly on all standardized tests and comprehension was never what I struggled with in school. I may not have had a great school experience, but I was raised in a highly-literate middle-class home, and this environment was able to provide the education school did not. And what I saw in school, just as Hirsch predicted, is my less-fortunate peers falling further and further behind and struggling to understand even simple passages that I thought were boringly simple.

My educational successes do not reflect how great our current educational approach is, it shows only that I succeeded in spite of the monumental waste of time and resources. Many others did not. I strongly recommend this book to anyone wishing to learn more about the effectiveness of these different "educational approaches" found in schools today. ( )

Anyone with a stake in the American educational system—so, all Americans but especially educators, educational policy makers, parents, and advocates—should read this book. People who haven't read a lot of pedagogy might find the writing a bit dry, but it's the best written (and least bogged down in jargon, abstraction, and vagueness) book on education that I've ever read, so if you have had to read a lot of pedagogy, The Knowledge Deficit will be a page turner! I want to hand it out to every teacher, administrator, and politician I know. ( )

Very good book and validation for any parent whose pulled their children out of the failing school systems. ( )

This is an admirable and brave little book.

E D Hirsch is an eminent educational thinker and writer whose tone is unfailingly calm and unassuming, even though he's confronting the US educational establishment head-on and telling them they're engaged in a vast educational malpractice, and that they need to repent their foolish ways and turn to the light.

Hirsch focuses on reading instruction here, but his theme is the same as it's been in several of his books (all of which I recommend): content matters. But instead of teaching children the traditional content they need to know to be literate, educated adults, the education system in the USA is dominated by two schools of thought that have useful contributions to make, but that are treated as dogma by today's 'progressive' ed profs and by many school administrators and teachers. The culprits? Naturalism (i.e. the belief that academic learning such as reading and arithmetic unfolds and grows as naturally in children as their ability to speak) and Formalism (the assumption that reading is a discrete 'skill' that can be taught via content-neutral algorithms and then transferred to any kind of material without any loss of efficacy.

Hirsch believes reality is much messier than the great mass of educational romantics assume it to be; that is, reading comprehension is always inextricably bound up in both the words that make up a given reading passage, and also in the tacit, background knowledge all writers must assume their readers already hold. That is, no text is fully self-explicating. Achieving full reading effectiveness therefore requires the reader to hold and recall a great deal of actual knowledge, which Hirsch has identified in his 'core knowledge' books and school programs.

All of this may seem commonsensical to ordinary people, but to the educational establishment Hirsch is a true revolutionary. Or maybe he's a closet reactionary, since although he professes to be politically liberal, his educational vision is profoundly traditionalist.

Hirsh's greatest strength, however, is that he's so constructive. Criticizing 'progressive' educational philosophy and practices is fish-in-the-barrel stuff. Hirsch does the necessary take-down, but he then goes on to propose a fully-worked-out plan for doing things better.

I highly recommend this compact, readable introduction to this important thinker's body of work. ( )