The Knowledge Deficit (Part 1)

Recently, I've been reading "The Knowledge Deficit" by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and in his book he makes a compelling argument about the problem with reading education. I'm only halfway through the book, but his justifications seem solid and at worst, make common sense. In essence, Hirsch attempts to debunk the "natural" approach to reading education, which is prevalent in today's schools. The "natural" approach to reading education is the idea that the capability to read occurs through natural development. Instead, Hirsch argues for a knowledge-based approach to reading, "to become a good comprehender, a child needs a great deal of knowledge (8)." With his arguments, Hirsch makes several interesting points:

* The merger of the meanings of term "reading." "The word reading has two senses, often confusingly lumped together. The first means the process of turning printed marks into sounds into words. But the second sense means the very different process of understanding those words (8)."

* The constant debate between naturalism (education should be natural and engaging) and formalism (all purpose, how-to-knowledge). The conflict between these two principles will constantly generate the need for continual reform and are an enemy of the reading goals of the beloved NCLB. "Advances in reading will depend on students gaining a great deal of information, this conflict of ideas [naturalism v. formalism] is the root cause of the impasse between NCLB and the schools, and the only way to improve scores in reading and to narrow the reading gap between groups is to systematically provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read (21)."

* To make his point throughout the text, Hirsch constantly refers to the "Matthew Effect" an allusion to a verse in the Gospel of Matthew that states that those who already have shall gain more and those who do not have, more shall be taken away. "Those who already have good language understanding will gain still more language proficiency, while those who lack initial understanding will fall further and further behind (25)."

* Hirsch argues that reading is like listening and our schools have been teaching these skills independent of each other. "Because we have though of reading and writing as separate from listening and talking, we have tended to spend large amounts of time--to much time--on the simple cat-in-the hat kinds of written material that young children are able to read and understand for themselves. We have failed to focus effectively on the knowledge of both language and the world that children can gain in those years only through speaking and listening, not through reading (27)."

* There should be an emphasis in early education on nonwritten oral activities such as adult aloud reading and other audible activities. Hirsch makes the point that written word (i.e. radio and television) are very similar to spoken word, because of the conventions that are similar in both, the ability to address an unknown unseen audience. These skills are necessary to develop reading in the early grades not just a focus on decoding words (see reading argument).

There are also some very interesting research points that Hirsch brings to light to reinforce his arguments:

* "We observe from low national reading scores that decoding fluency in grade four, when are children's scores are moderately high by international standards, does not automatically develop into comprehension fluency in grade twelve, when are student's scores are low (35)."

* One study Hirsch mentions, looked at the difference between students who had high decoding skills but low domain specific knowledge (baseball) and those who had low decoding skills, but high domain specific knowledge. "As predicted, the reading comprehension of the low-skills, baseball-knowing group proved superior to the reading comprehension of the high-skills, baseball-ignorant group for that particular text (37)."

So far this text is excellent and I look forward to reading the last half of the book and sharing my thoughts with you.