Thank you netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I had a difficult time getting through this book. Although the topic of today's education system is of interest to me, the material was not engaging bit rather dense and packed in. He includes conversation with real educators but it seemed rather repetitive and stagnant. Just not what I had hoped to read.

A fascinating look at how the core curriculum movement can support healing the current divides in our nation. The concept of creating a common social language resonates more strongly than ever in these politically divisive times.

Think about your elementary school classroom. What did you learn? How was it taught? Did you learn the same thing as everyone else, or did you have lots of choices in your learning?
There has been a trend in the last fifty years or so toward what is called a “child-centered” classroom, especially at the elementary school level (but I am a high school teacher and I see a huge influence from the movement as well). In this classroom, the child gets to direct his or her learning, choose topics, and be guided by the teacher. If you think you have been untouched by this influence completely, think about the last time you heard about “discovery learning”, “inquiry learning”, “project-based learning”, or the adage that “the teacher should not be a sage on the stage, but a guide on the side”. E.D. Hirsch’s new book, How to Educate a Citizen, is both a polemic against the child-centered classroom and a call to create a system of science-backed strategies to take its place.
Before I lose all the teachers who have been trained in some version of these strategies (as have I), I want to say that I see some good in them that Hirsch does not expound upon. I have no experience with “discovery learning”, but I do use what I call “inquiry-based” learning in my classroom: the difference between what I do and what Hirsch discusses is that in my classroom, I make the inquiry. In many classrooms around the country, the child both develops the question they want to answer and attempts to answer it. The obvious counter to this is: How does the student know what question to ask if he/she knows nothing about the content? Project-based learning was all the rage in my teacher education, and while there is a place for student-produced projects as an assessment of knowledge, that knowledge must first be gained from regular-old instruction. So should the teacher refrain from being a “sage on the stage” and only be a “guide on the side” the research says a few things on this. First, the traditional classroom lecture where the teacher talks and the student listens for 45–120 minutes is not the most efficient method of learning if used by itself. But it is also not effective for students to have no direct instruction and instead “guide their own learning”. A mix of instructional methods, activities, and scaffolding from teacher-produced to student-produced learning is necessary for an optimal outcome.
How to Educate a Citizen investigates some of these principles and much more. Hirsch imagines a “common school” approach such as that of early America and other countries today, where everyone learns the same content at the same time. This is in contrast to the child-centered notion of students being able to choose what to learn, and Hirsch argues (with data!) that the shared-knowledge approach leads to dramatically better outcomes in student learning. Hirsch also argues against “standards” because they are vague and lead to teachers teaching a variety of different content to meet the standards. I have a small issue here.
In my experience, there are two types of standards: “skills” and “content” standards. A lot of skills standards, a lot of which are vague, represent what Hirsch successfully contends are “nonexistent” skills (“21st-century” skills and “critical thinking” skills draw most of the ire here). Hirsch makes the point that general skills like these (and “language proficiency”) cannot be learned. He says you can learn a specific skill but not a general one. I agree to a large extent here, because these skills are not directly teachable or measurable and must be gained over long periods alongside content. But, as defined, they can be learned. In essence, they are higher-order skills that should be the goals of all education. But these skills should not be standards. Other skills, however, should be standards. For instance, reading maps, graphs, and charts should be standards for a social studies class because they are teachable and measurable. As for content standards, these are necessary to achieve what Hirsch is proposing. They would need to be specific in the learning outcome they are aiming for, but they are necessary. Hirsch believes that common textbooks are the answer because everyone would be learning the same content, but I find that to be less than desirable because 1) I don’t want teachers to rely solely on the textbook for content, and 2) whatever committee would be tasked to come up with a common curriculum, I wouldn’t trust them to pick or create a good textbook. Yes, you’d have to rely on good teachers in my hypothetical universe, so I’ve got an answer for that: pay teachers more and you will recruit better teachers. These teachers would be able to take a content standard like the College Board provides for their AP courses and turn that into an effective learning experience. I’ve seen it happen because I teach alongside plenty of these people.
I am a firm believer that content is the most important thing in teaching. The method is a close second. Content (specifically shared knowledge) is crucial because it can be built upon. Says Cathy, a teacher with experience in both child-centered and knowledge-centered classrooms:
From a parental perspective, you couldn’t give me enough time to speak about the difference in education it makes having a shared body of knowledge that builds up over time. When they’re in the younger grades, they grow this small seed of knowledge, and then as it’s continued; it cycles up and you’re adding to it. It becomes that whole association and assimilation idea that I learned about in undergrad but was never truly able to help my students gain access to. I knew they had it in their minds somewhere, but they were never able to find it, because they had lots of little seeds, but nothing built up to a wider scheme of knowledge they could access and add to.
Hirsch almost lost me with his nation-building idea, because I am averse to nationalism due to the last decade of American events. But he defines the nation as the inclusive ideas of “Liberty, Equality, and Kindness — our version of that great triple motto from the French Revolution”. And if you’re defining the nation as that; if, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “It is patriotic to support (the president) insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country” (again, with “the country” defined by that triple motto); then I can support Hirsch’s nationalism.
He also has paradigm-breaking ideas about ethnicity that are refreshing to read. Carefully inspect the argument he makes in these longer passages:
Our Enlightenment founders were quite profound in conceiving that we could fashion ourselves into a new, broader ethnicity based on sound ethical and political principles. That leaves the way open to individuals’ adopting more than one cultural identity simultaneously, just as they can readily learn more than one language. It puts new light on the centuries-long American debate over whether a nation should properly be, culturally speaking, a melting pot or a salad bowl. The new brain studies say: “Hold on! That’s not an either-or proposition.” An individual does not need to choose one or the other, and neither does a nation. The either-or proposition is essentialist; it assumes that you must give up one identity if you adopt another. This is wrong. All of us have multiple social identities, and none of them is the essential “me.” And in a modern nation, one of those identities — the chief one — needs to be one that is shared with other citizens, all of whom are equally fellow Americans with the same basic identity, rights, and privileges as our own.
The American idea gradually evolved into the idea of deliberate self-transformation. An individual can become a new person, an American. America was to embrace everyone who wanted to belong, and, for the more radical thinkers in the North like Herman Melville, this new person could be of any race or former nationality. That’s adhering to the blank-slate principle on a big scale, and it has profound relevance to our current internal conflicts over race and ethnicity. That issue is a chief reason neocortical research is currently so important. It shows that ethnicity is not inherent but learned. It can be altered. It can be accompanied by a second ethnicity with equal authenticity. By education it can be unmade and made.
This both shows the importance of education and does away with the unhelpful “melting pot”/ “salad bowl” binary. It’s great. I want a whole book just on this.
While Hirsch and I disagree on the “how” of shared knowledge (I am more in favor of letting states and local school districts decide curriculum and I like content specific skill standards), we agree wholeheartedly on the “why”. I would recommend How to Educate a Citizen for any teacher, parent, or community leader passionate about education and how it happens, because these ideas can change American education for the better.
I also look forward to getting to The Knowledge Gap, which seems like it deals with the same sorts of issues in American education.
I received a review copy of How to Educate a Citizen courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

Working in a school, I hear all of the time that the schools are teaching to the State testing for funding. This is the reasoning for why our schools are falling short, or is it? The author of this book lays out the case for how our schools are failing students by "dumbing down" material in order to teach using techniques that do not work. The author shows how our students are not gaining the important skills needed to work with others and come together to solve issues. This was a really eye-opening read and one that I will be recommending to my coworkers.