The education establishment, which he castigates in the book, seems in a forgiving mood. Several hundred schools have adopted his ideas and some prestigious schools of education are taking him seriously, it has been reported. Professor Hirsch's book attacks and proposes. It attacks progressive theories that have held education in thrall for most of the century. Their emphasis has been on process, which they dress up in obscure jargon.
Content is anathema.
Nowhere is this misplaced progressivism more clearly at work than in the educators' argument that what really counts is teaching kids how to learn, how to think critically, how to solve problems, and that what really does not count is subject matter. But as Professor Hirsch points out, there's no such thing as critical thinking without something to think about. You can't think critically about chess if you don't know anything about chess, he says. The same goes for farming, sailing or any other topic you can name. Trying to teach skills without teaching knowledge inevitably means that neither gets taught.