E. D. Hirsch

Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. is an American literary critic and educator, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, known for developing the concept of cultural literacy, the body of shared background knowledge that he argued is necessary for reading comprehension and full participation in a society's discourse. His 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know argued that American schools had shifted too far toward teaching abstract skills at the expense of shared factual knowledge, sparking wide debate. Hirsch founded the Core Knowledge Foundation to develop a content-specific curriculum sequence for schools built on his cultural literacy framework.