Beyond Comprehension - We Have Yet to Adopt a Common Core Curriculum That Builds Knowledge Grade by Grade—But We Need To

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by McGucket

Advances the argument that strong reading comprehension depends on cumulative, domain-specific knowledge rather than interchangeable general background knowledge. Critiques prevailing American education views that any general knowledge will support proficient reading, noting long-term declines in reading and SAT results. Uses experimental evidence showing baseball knowledge and decoding skill interact to determine comprehension. Proposes that reading programs should systematically build knowledge grade by grade to support complex texts and real-world literacy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Faulty Ideas

Activating background knowledge without building it

All-purpose reading skills vs knowledge-building curricula

Beyond Comprehension We Have Yet to Adopt a Common Core Curriculum That Builds Knowledge Grade by Grade—But We Need To ILLUSTRAT IONS BY JAMES YANG By E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The prevailing view of the American educational com munity is that no specific background knowledge is needed for reading. Any general background knowledge will do. This innocent-sounding idea, so liberating to the teacher and the student, frees schools from any requirement to teach a specific body of knowledge. This purported liberation from“mere” information and rote learning is one of the most precious principles of American educational thought, and lies at its very E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the author of many articles and books, including the bestsellers Cultural Literacy and The Schools We Need. He is a fellow of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences and the founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation. This article is adapted from The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Copyright © 2006 by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. core. Its proponents disparage those who favor a definite, cumulative course of study for children as “traditional,”“hidebound,” and“reactionary,” to mention only the more polite terms. Yet the supposedly liberating and humane idea that any general background knowledge will serve to educate children and make them proficient readers is not only incorrect, it is also very old and tired; it has had its day for at least half a century, during which time American reading proficiency and verbal SAT scores have declined drastically.1 (For a detailed explanation of the drop in SAT scores, see Marilyn Jager Adams’s article on page 3.) Scapegoats for the decline, such as television and social forces, have been invoked to explain it, but they cannot fully explain why other nations, equally addicted to television but not to American educational theories that disparage “mere” information, have not suffered a similarly drastic decline in reading proficiency.2 It is true that given a good start in decoding, a child will develop fluency and accuracy in decoding with practice. And it is also true that decoding is a skill that can be transferred from 30 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2010–2011 one text to another. But the progress of a child’s reading comprehension is different. That progress does not follow a reliable course of development. Because comprehension is knowledge dependent, someone who reads well about the Civil War may not necessarily read well about molecular interactions. One particularly elegant experiment was conducted to find out how important domain-specific knowledge isin actual reading tasks.3 In two of the groups of students studied, one had good decoding skills but little knowledge of the subject, baseball, while another had poor decoding skills but knew a lot about baseball. As predicted, the reading comprehension of the lowskills, baseball-knowing group proved superior to the reading comprehension of the high-skills, baseball-ignorant group. These results have been replicated in other situations and knowledge domains; they show the powerful effect of prior knowledge on actual reading ability.4 Faulty Ideas Most current reading programs talk about “activating” the reader’s background knowledge so she can comprehend a text. But in practice, they are only paying lip service to the finding that background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Little attempt is made to enlarge children’s background knowledge—and, as a direct result, little is accomplished in terms of expanding children’s ability to comprehend more complex and varied texts. The disjointed topics and stories that one finds in current reading programs, such as “Going to School” and “Jenny atthe Supermarket,” seem designed mainly to appeal to the knowl

FAQs

What does the article criticize about many current reading programs?

They often treat background knowledge as something to “activate” rather than expand systematically. This results in limited growth in students’ ability to comprehend complex and varied texts.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by McGucket