E D Hirsch is a voice crying out in the wilderness. Although he has seen his Core Knowledge curriculum gain a beachhead on the vast and desolate shores of American schooling, he’s getting well on in years, and his tone in this his latest book is more urgent than ever.

Hirsch’s project is straightforward, coherent, and sensible. He believes that the decline in American educational standards, especially in reading, can be traced to the early 20th-century abandoning of a content-rich, democracy-nourishing curriculum in schools, in favor of a child-centered, anti-content program focused on process. This impoverished and counterproductive approach now dominates American schools, and is dogma in university education programs, with doubters labeled as heretics and almost ritually cast out.

The result is bad schools in which children are expected to become educated via a kind of magical indirect osmosis as they engage in endless process-based activities and drills. How will Junior learn how to find Mozambique on a map? Oh, he’ll pick that up when he’s collaborating in a group activity designing a tribal mask . . . .

So Hirsch has been down this road before – see both Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them – but it’s still worth the time reading this book. Hirsch develops philosophical foundations for his program at much greater depth here, looking back to the American founders, and stating with power and elegance why a common linguistic and cultural base is not just important for the ongoing health of a democracy, but decisive.

It’s almost sad, however, to read the passages in The Making of Americans in which Hirsch tries to convince his many liberal/left critics that he’s really on their side. He argues (utterly persuasively to me, but I’m a conservative) that equipping all children with the same cultural knowledge is the surest path to equality of opportunity, but throughout his career this plea has fallen on deaf ears – not only in the education establishment, but among liberals in general. Hirsch admits that although he’s a life-long political liberal, the only people who will entertain his ideas are conservatives.

I think Hirsch underestimates – or at least tries to ignore – the hostility of the American left to the kind of education he has devoted his considerable talents and energies to promoting. In one telling example, he asks, plaintively, that wouldn’t it be great if following a core knowledge curriculum could reduce the achievement gap between white and Asian students on side, and Black and Hispanic students on the other, and thereby eliminate the need for affirmative action? But to much of the left, that would be a disaster. Affirmative action is the lifeblood of their political program; the maintenance of the achievement gap is an unacknowledged feature, not a bug.

So give Hirsch unending credit for storming those heavily-fortified beaches one more time. His quest may be quixotic, but it’s certainly inspiring. And since Hirsch is so obviously right, perhaps his day will yet come. I hope he will still be with us to enjoy it. ( )