EA, have you read E.D. Hirsch?

Independent nonprofit GreatSchools.org reports that more than 400 of these schools are preschools. While he was not directly involved in developing the Common Core State Standards adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia, many education watchers credit E.D. Hirsch as having provided the "intellectual foundation" for the initiative. While the Core Knowledge Foundation in the US describes itself as non-partisan,19 Hirsch himself is an avowed Democrat who has described himself as "practically a socialist"4 and "a man of the Left, the Old Left".

20 Over the years, he has expressed deep sympathy for underprivileged minority youths and has stated that he specifically designed a curriculum to "place all children on common ground, sharing a common body of knowledge. Ironically, since "Cultural Literacy" was first published in The American Scholar in 1983, Hirsch has often been embraced by political conservatives and attacked by liberals and progressives. William Bennett, a prominent conservative who served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later US Secretary of Education, was an early proponent of Hirsch's views.

Harvard University professor Howard Gardner, who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, has been a long-time critic of Hirsch. Gardner described one of his own books, The Disciplined Mind (1999), as part of a "sustained dialectic" with E.D. Hirsch, and criticized Hirsch's curriculum as "at best superficial and at worst anti-intellectual". While acknowledging that criticism and debate "have been very good for business,"21 Hirsch has openly expressed his frustration with ongoing accusations of intellectual elitism and racism.

In reality, critics of Hirsch come from both progressive and conservative circles. 24 As Jason R. Former UK Education Secretary Michael Gove publicly expressed his admiration for E.D. Hirsch as early as 2009,30 and education watchers have suggested that the revised national curriculum first proposed by Gove in 2011 was heavily influenced by E.D. Hirsch.

Hirsch has been awarded several fellowships and honors, including the Fulbright Fellowship (1955), the Morse Fellowship (1960), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1964), the Explicator Prize (1965), the NEA Fellowship (1970), the NEH Senior Fellowship (1971-71), the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities Fellowship (1973), the Princeton University Fellowship in the Humanities (1977), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship at Stanford University (1980–81). At University of Virginia he was Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus, in addition to Professor of Education and Humanities. He has received honorary degrees from Rhodes College and Williams College.