First, knowledge makes you smarter. So says E. D. Hirsch of the Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization he created to articulate and promote cultural and educational literacy. Before you say “duh” to Hirsch’s observation, understand that his simple statement sums up a great deal of research on achievement differences, what Hirsch prefers to call the knowledge gap.
Scores on tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal the consequence of the problem. White students consistently outscore black students and most other minorities on the test, with a gap that widens from kindergarten to the fourth grade, and persists thereafter. What’s going on?
Evidence strongly suggests that knowledge builds knowledge. But what about income and home environment? Both influence test scores, but the correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status, according to Hirsch, is 0.42, while the correlation between academic achievement and general knowledge is 0.81. Though parents, peers, and neighborhood influence one’s breadth of knowledge, general knowledge plays a larger role than both of these.
Erasing the achievement gap requires restoring common knowledge to the school curriculum, and building comprehension from there. And studies show that intelligence increases with knowledge.
So what makes smart people smart, more knowledgeable, more competent, and ultimately better citizens? Facts, to begin with, Hirsch said. “The research literature is very clear on this point: that highly skilled intellectual competence comes after, not before, you know a lot of ‘mere facts.’” Knowledge of facts is the access door to the deep understanding, necessary to “attain all those higher-order thinking skills which are so widely praised by educational experts and so wrongly contrasted with ‘mere facts.’”
Knowing more and learning faster
Psychologists have discovered that knowing more makes people better and faster learners of new things, Hirsch said. It also improves your ability to think critically. Hirsch cites Bill Gates as an example of someone who knows a lot of facts, who has always, and still does, read a lot.
Hirsch also cites Keith Stanovich, a Canadian reading researcher, who observed that two individuals with the same level and kind of IQ will learn at different rates, and function at different levels of competence, depending on the level of general knowledge they possess. Innate talent is important, Hirsch said, but overemphasized in American education.
Ultimately, this discussion must translate into how to cultivate student competence. According to Hirsch, it turns out that the biggest factor in student achievement is teacher quality, but he is careful to articulate what that means. The single most consistent predictor of the teacher quality-student achievement tie, he said, is the teacher’s score on the verbal SAT.
A vocabulary test, yes, but Hirsch argues that it is not just a test of words. Words stand for things, and knowledge of things, he says, is the basis of understanding. Beyond that, more knowledge correlates with larger annual income. Few object to that success.
You can always look it up, right?
Cognitive psychologists have come to a consensus that “it takes knowledge to gain knowledge,” Hirsch reported in You Can Always Look It Up–Or Can You? This is the crux of analyzing achievement gaps between students. Rather than a breadth vs. depth battle in education, we should use elements of both. The best way to learn a subject is to learn general principles as well as “an ample number of specific examples that illustrate those principles.” This is so, Hirsch said, because general knowledge provides access to deep knowledge.
We should teach a diversity of subjects for acquisition of general knowledge, and a moderate number of specific examples. It is not necessary, nor optimal, to polarize learning into the “deep-understanding” or the “mere facts” camp. Instead, Hirsch advocates teaching a core of common knowledge. Core common knowledge, Hirsch discovered, is taken for granted in college classrooms, newspapers, books, and other settings. An inventory of knowledge “characteristically shared at the top of the socioeconomic ladder,” “elite” knowledge, ought to be available to everyone, he said. Not only that, but since it is assumed that everyone knows this information, it forms a background of facts, and the basis of a richer comprehension of the world. Without this background, students are handicapped in their fundamental understanding of things, concepts, and events.
Vocabulary — what does it mean?
Prekindergarten children display enormous differences in vocabulary, according to researchers Hart and Risley in Meaningful Differences. The differences grow, they explain, because children who have low vocabularies learn less from the same lesson than do children who have higher vocabularies. Vocabulary acquisition is a marker for cultural and factual knowledge, basically knowledge of things. To understand something that you read, hear or look up requires 95 percent comprehension of what you encounter. “To make it worthwhile to look something up, you already need to know 95 percent of the words,” they say.
Thomas Landauer of the University of Colorado describes a process whereby we continually refine the meaning of words, even when they do not appear in the current context, because we reflect on related words in a similar category, or “domain.” Unusual words are rarely heard in normal conversation, but are familiar to educated people. Landauer notes that these are picked up in reading, and that our minds reflect on them subconsciously over time.
An advantaged 17-year-old with broad exposure to vocabulary knows 80,000 words. A broad curriculum builds vocabulary, and the critical difference between advantaged and disadvantaged children, Hirsch said, is vocabulary. Since vocabulary is primarily picked up in reading, “building knowledge and vocabulary cannot be replaced by brief incursions into the dictionary or the Internet.” Hirsch is emphatic on the point that “students cannot learn or probe deeply into material that is largely new to them.” You can’t always, it seems, just look it up.
Breadth plus depth
The expert-novice paradox demonstrates why those who know more learn more, and faster. Experiments by researcher de Groot show that the expert can memorize a complex new chess position in a few seconds; the novice remembers very little. The novice has to pay attention to a mass of unfamiliar information, losing most of it. The expert pays attention only to what is new. Because the expert can store novel information within a very familiar context, recall is easy. Likewise with the child studying a definition of the word ‘planet,‘ Hirsch said. If the definition says “sometimes includes asteroids,” “excludes comets and meteoroids,” refers to “nonluminous bodies,” and notes that planets revolve around stars other than the sun, depth of understanding will depend on how familiar the child is with the vocabulary he encounters in the definition. Some knowledge, even inarticulate knowledge, of the concepts discussed are a prerequisite for good comprehension.
A well-informed person could simply pay attention to the subset of information he does not already know, answering the narrower question, for example, of whether meteoroids are ever considered planets. Breadth is not the enemy of depth, Hirsch said. The progressive view of studying a few topics in depth does not succeed because specific knowledge builds on the framework of prior general knowledge.
An entire academic career without general knowledge and vocabulary-building is like trying to decorate a home in which the walls are not yet installed. The decor embellishes the basic structure, which must first be in place. The big idea that motivates Hirsch’s thinking and writing on this topic is that knowledge has great power to create general skills and competence in students (and the rest of us). In a talk titled Why General Knowledge Should be a Goal of Education in a Democracy, Hirsch sums up scientifically confirmed reasons for his views: 1) more knowledge makes you smarter, 2) more general knowledge makes you generally more competent in the tasks of life, and 3) giving everybody more general knowledge makes everybody more competent, resulting in a more just society. Whether a persons’ job turns out to be mechanic or plain GI, Hirsch said, “the more you know, the better you do in life.”
Palasek is assistant editor for Carolina Journal.