The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

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A child's mind is hungry for knowledge, stimulation, the excitement of learning.

A child's school should provide these things. But most American schools do not. From kindergarten through high school, our public educational system is among the worst in the developed world. For over fifty years, American schools have operated on the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning “process” should be emphasized over the facts taught. All this is tragically wrong.

As renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues in The Schools We Need, in disdaining content-based curricula for abstract—and discredited—theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive, information-based economy in which we now live, our school practices have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn.

There is a solution. Mainstream research has shown that if children—all children not just the privileged—are taught in ways that emphasize hard work, the learning of facts, and rigorous testing, their enthusiasm for school will grow, their test scores will rise, and they will become successful citizens in the informational-age civilization.

Hirsch's argument is so well-reasoned, his conclusions so well-documented, that The Schools We Need cannot, and will not, be ignored. there is no more pressing issue in this country than the future of our children, and it is time we all did something about it.