How to Educate a Citizen

The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation

De: E. D. Hirsch

Narrado por: Rob Shapiro

“Profound, vital and correct. Hirsch highlights the essence of our American being and the radical changes in education necessary to sustain that essence. Concerned citizens, teachers, and parents take note! We ignore this book at our peril." (Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City Public Schools)

In this powerful manifesto, the best-selling author of Cultural Literacy addresses the failures of America’s early education system and its impact on our current national malaise, advocating for a shared knowledge curriculum students everywhere can be taught - an educational foundation that can help improve and strengthen America’s unity, identity, and democracy.

In How to Educate a Citizen, E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began 30 years ago with his classic best seller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly at the elementary level, to educate our children more effectively to help heal and preserve the nation. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on “child-centered learning”. History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge have been dumbed down by vacuous learning “techniques” and “values-based” curricula; indoctrinated by graduate schools of education, administrators and educators have believed they are teaching reading and critical thinking skills. Yet these cannot be taught in the absence of strong content, Hirsch argues.

The consequence is a loss of shared knowledge that would enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions. A broken approach to school not only leaves our children underprepared and erodes the American dream, but also loosens the spiritual bonds and unity that hold the nation together.

Drawing on early schoolmasters and educational reformers such as Noah Webster and Horace Mann, Hirsch charts the rise and fall of the American early education system and provides a blueprint for closing the national gap in knowledge, communications, and allegiance. Critical and compelling, How to Educate a Citizen galvanizes our schools to equip children with the power of shared knowledge.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 E. D. Hirsch (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

Read or Listen to this book.

All parents should listen to or read this book.we as a nation needs to make a educational change.

Must read

When we learn, really learn from our missteps, we can overcome so much. This illustrates quite well why it's in everyone's interest to have a shared education which allows for a shared understanding.

eye opening and timely

Good, brief, discussion of the history of constructivism and the core knowledge approach and their impact on learning through the lens of research. Timely commentary on how this issue impacts how nations create citizens.

Awakening

an awakening what was supposed to be and what had actually taken place.

Give American children the chance

We need to take back education

The book lays a foundation on how to improve teaching that leads to better more well rounded and capable students. Our future depends on this change.

Practice in Reserving Judgement

There are many times in this text that I was tempted to stop reading entirely. The points the author makes can ruffle many feathers. While I don't believe his point that American Schools need to make a point of enforcing patriotism in school, I do agree that common knowledge can in general inspire a patriotism that the nation has slowly fallen out of love with. Certainly the education system in the United States would benefit from some kind of reform. By the end of the book, and while disagreeing with some of his points, I was able to see that the author is not taking any sort of political stance, but an academic one, that children do better when they are expected to learn the same kinds of things at the same periods of time so that they can all share a common knowledge to draw off of in personal and professional settings going forward.

very enlightening

as an educated parents of young children I am enlightened greatly by this book. I thank the author for taking the time to voice his opinion on modern education. I was personally educated for 6 years in a Eastern country and then move to this country for the rest of my education (up to postgraduate education). I would welcome a change of my children's education to more of a Core Curriculum concept compared to where we stand today. Beautiful book.

Timely & important, but not a bullseye

E D Hirsh Jr makes a strong but not compelling case for returning to a “content based” primary and secondary education system. The reader will have to determine if the arguments are valid of if the author has mistaken correlation for causation. Worth the read and thought provoking.

Egg heady stuff

Not really my cup of tea, suggested by a friend. I'm sure it has more pertinence to someone in the education field.

Very disappointed

I loved the idea of this book, but it is wildly flawed. I really try to read 2-3 different books on pedagogy each year and this one felt like Fox News for people that can read. This one was mostly feels with a few anecdotes and cherry picked stats and some bold claims.

Disclaimer: lots of pedagogy books are just bad fads. The most useful one this year was Aims of Education by North Whitehead, though the math chapters were not that helpful for me.

There are good basic ideas in this book, but books can’t stand alone on broad ideas like educated citizens and shared culture.

Pretending like most of American schools are either only student centered or knowledge centered is dishonest. The entire book is based upon that false premise. Maybe, that’s an east coast issue, but in Nebraska we don’t teach in such fixed ways. The book is also rooted in the idea that we no longer have a shared culture and that ELA canon doesn’t exist anymore and that’s why we’re polarized and our students are struggling.

No mention of smart phones or technology or changes in culture or high teacher turnover/burnout or widening income gaps or busier parents that might want to be more friends than authority figures or a general decline in reading—just that America is more divided because fewer kids are reading The Scarlet Letter (obviously exaggerating).

I struggled to finish this because it felt liked bombastic news segment almost the entire time. Last book I try by this clown.