By Walter Feinberg

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There is no disputing the influence of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. A familiar figure to parents, teachers and administrators, his books -- ranging from Cultural Literacy, to his "Core Knowledge Series," to his most recent book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them -- can be found in bookstores across the country. Both conservatives such as Chester Finn and liberals such as Henry Louis Gates have supported his "Core Knowledge Series."

Beneath the appealing titles and approaches, what is Hirsch's basic message? What are the assumptions underpinning his message? Most important, what are the implications of Hirsch's approach to education in a multicultural society?

Hirsch's first book, Cultural Literacy, strongly insinuates that economic equality rests on uniformity of subject matter in school, in the view that poor people are at a disadvantage in the economic marketplace mainly because they lack baseline "content knowledge." His most recent book, The Schools We Need, argues that the misguided ideas of progressive education are responsible for much of the academic ills of the poor, because such ideas have led to anarchy in school curriculum and prevented uniformity of subject matter.

Hirsch's basic message is that there is important subject matter, or content, that all students need to learn, that this content should be appropriately sequenced and uniformly paced, and that there should be objective measurement of whether students master the content. According to Hirsch, sequencing has to do with the logic of the subject matter and not the "age readiness" of the child, a concept which he dismisses with considerable scorn. He argues that children need to master the simpler elements of content before they can move on to more complex ones, and that all children at a certain grade should receive this material at approximately the same time without wasteful repetition from one year to the next.