The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children

The reason I gave this book four stars is that despite the short length, it is a fairly dense book that dangles captivating ideas without fleshing them out clearly until the very end. You keep getting the feeling you know what the author is getting at, but he never gets to the details. Specifically, it seems as though he is never going to tell just what the common knowledge every student should have actually is. In spite of this, it is a worthwhile treatise on problems in education, and specifically the area of reading competency. Everyone, including parents and teachers, suspects that there is a problem with No Child Left Behind and similar standards in education. Hirsch's book suggests one possible way of looking at it. He claims that the stated goals are actually incongruent with what they are testing. Specifically, he points out that reading comprehension is basically a function of background knowledge, but that reading tests often attempt to test generic skills such as comprehension and identification of main ideas, sequence, intent, and the like. His solution is to advocate a standardized curriculum nationwide, grade by grade. He points out that by teaching a standard set of background information, we could avoid many problems that students experience when moving from school to school, and we could level the playing field between students who come in with a lot of prior knowledge and those that do not. He seems to admit, in a roundabout way, that such findings do not mesh well with current ideas on pedagogy and may be difficult to institute because they fall into the realm of unthinkable for cultural reasons.

If this was the 60's Hirsch could easily by called communist. Although he does a good job describing why there is a knowledge gap, his proposed recommendation for closing that gap is a poor one. He encourages holding children who are capable for more advanced learning back with the children who are starting from a more basic level because of their home background, thus making all children carbon copies of each other. His method effectually punishes the children from well-educated homes.
While the educational system needs fixing and this book is thought-provoking, it is not the answer to our educational problems.