The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them.

By E.D. Hirsch Doublesday, $24.95

E.D. Hirsch Jr., was briefly famous in 1987, but mostly due to bad timing. In his book Cultural Literacy, the University of Virginia professor of English argued that most American adults have too little factual knowledge about history, literature, science, and other fields to sustain an intelligent national discourse. But many media commentators ignored the argument and merely compiled cutesy, stump-you quizzes from Cultural Literacy's appendix, a list of important names and terms Hirsch believes all Americans should be able to identify. It was easy to perceive him less as a would-be education reformer than as an apologist for the 1980s trivia-game fad.

Hirsch's ideas deserve better treatment. In his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, he again asserts that general factual knowledge is a vital part of learning. He also believes this factual knowledge should be enshrined in specific nationwide educational standards. Yet for decades, progressive-minded education professors have urged teachers in grades K-12 to eschew facts--say, the roles of the major figures in the French Revolution--in favor of critical-thinking skills, even though considerable psychological research and the performance of American students in international comparisons suggest that this approach is ineffective. Certainly Hirsch is making a bold claim: that most education researchers are simply wrong about how children learn, just as Marxists were simply wrong about the way economies work. But his analysis is fascinating, and his conclusions are often compelling.

Many education writers and researchers would hardly be bothered by the suggestion that schools don't teach facts anymore. "The blowout of potential information on the information superhighway is an indication of the implausibility of a factoid-based approach to curriculum," one educator declared in a telling letter to The Washington Post. "Students have to be challenged to articulate the questions that need attention in the solution of problems.... Students don't need to be drilled in isolated facts; they need the intellectual space to develop skills for asking pertinent questions and for knowing where and how to find the needed data" Most contemporary education researchers believe rigid content requirements effectively require the stupefying repetition of often irrelevant data, impede children's acquisition of cognitive skills, and prevent teachers from catering to individual students' strengths and needs.

This belief is variously called "progressive," "modern," or "child-centered," and Hirsch cleverly traces its origins to a strain of naturalistic individualism that grew out of the Romantic movement and still pervades American culture To Hirsch, the success of such bestsellers as The Hurried Child proves that Americans are suspicious of artificial interference with the natural development of children. And if the popular notion is that children learn what they need to know when they're good and ready to know it, the idea that children shouldn't be burdened with abstract facts becomes comprehensible. Frequently, other progressive innovations follow, including "hands-on" discovery learning, descriptive report cards without letter grades, the abandonment of "whole-class" instruction, and the postponement of certain mathematics topics until "developmentally appropriate" ages. Progressive theorists believe classroom education should be as lifelike and natural as possible.

But formal education is an inherently artificial process, and the introduction of naturalistic methods may not improve it. In systematic studies of instructional methods, children in progressive classrooms couldn't read or do math as well as children whose teachers taught facts and required considerable repetition and practice, and usually addressed the entire class at once. Discovery learning, for example, is a pleasant but inefficient way to teach traditional academic subjects. Students in an honors geometry class I happened to visit at a well-respected Louisiana public high school spent an hour photographing examples of geometric figures around the school yard. But while the assignment probably did force students to "think critically" about the relationship between geometry and nature, they might have thought much harder by learning in the hoary old way: working through proofs of complex geometrical theorems.

Hirsch is not claiming that the ability to recite obscure dates or definitions should be the goal of education. But he does believe that knowing certain facts is vital to substantive learning. He declares, "The real-life competencies that people need, such as the abilities to read, to write, to communicate, to learn, to analyze, and to grasp and manipulate mathematical symbols, have major components that psychologists have found to be `domain-specific.' this means that an ability to think critically about chess does not translate into an ability to think critically about sailing" It also means that learning can't be painless. Unfortunately, the repetition that educational progressives deride as "drill and kill" is key to mastering most vital skills, including reading, composition, and mathematical computation. "Constantly to create a lifelike,`meaningful context is not the principle that is followed in teaching young children ballet, or piano playing, or downfield blocking, where some admixture of specialized drill and practice is thought to be essential," Hirsch writes.

To Hirsch, the contrast between the worldwide renown of American universities and the depressing (but now familiar) performance of American elementary- and secondary-school students in international comparisons proves the superiority of traditional education. "Our colleges and universities ...place great value on depth, breadth and accuracy of knowledge, as well as on independence of thought," he writes. "But depth, breadth and accuracy of knowledge are the very things that our K-12 system tends to disparage as belonging to the `banking theory of schooling."' Ultimately, the ubiquitous (but ill-defined) critical thinking that elementary and secondary educators so value is only possible when students know enough facts--and therefore have enough points of reference--about the world to make reasonable inferences and conclusions, Hirsch believes. Applying formal skills to looked-up data is a poor substitute for critical thinking about subject matter that a student knows well.

Yet education scholars who advocate research-based methods often seem to operate in a universe bounded by the work of other education scholars and impervious to the findings of psychology and neurobiology. And they dismiss international comparisons that ought to alarm them by pointing to America's considerable cultural diversity and social problems. Hirsch rightly sees this excuse for what it is: a condescending presumption that poor and/or minority children can never be expected to learn as much as soccer-playing white kids from the suburbs. Assuming that students don't learn facts in school, Hirsch suggests that wealthier students' main advantage is that they learn more facts at home than poorer students do.

This assertion is surely an over-simplification, but it packs considerable explanatory power: In France, where even preschools are subject to a fact-based national core curriculum, the learning gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, including immigrant children from North Africa, narrows with every school year. In early 1925, before the advent of progressive curricula, low-income black soldiers from states with good educational systems scored higher on standardized tests than white soldiers from states with bad schools. (Of course, progressives dispute the value of standardized tests, possibly because the results are often discouraging.) Hirsch's suggestion that a classical liberal education furthers the modern liberal's pursuit of equity and the conservative's pursuit of efficiency is the knockout punch of his book.

Unfortunately, Hirsch is a bit overzealous. In The Schools We Need, he often writes as if American schools have taught no factual content whatsoever since mid-century. Just as good teachers in traditional schools have always leavened their lectures with visual aids and occasional hands-on projects, the good teachers in progressive schools recognize that students need a generous helping of factual knowledge to learn. And he doesn't consider such factors as the length of the academic year and the low salary of teachers relative to other professions as explanations for American schools' poor performance. But he's right to sound an alarm about the excesses of educational progressivism. Sometimes even the best teachers can fall victim to misbegotten theories.

DANTE RAMOS is a reporter at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.