What Does a Stomach Do?

Author E.D. Hirsch Jr. set educators squabbling with his 1987 best seller Cultural Literacy, which tried to establish the minimum shared knowledge that American schools ought to provide. The University of Virginia English professor listed 4,600 items, ranging from the electron to the Emancipation Proclamation, that every educated adult should be able to identify. Now Hirsch is taking his program of core knowledge to the elementary-school level. In the first two of a six-textbook series for Grades 1 through 6, he boldly proposes the things tots ought to learn.

What Your 1st Grader Needs to Know (Doubleday; $15) asks youngsters, among other things: What did Little Miss Muffet sit on? What does a stomach do? Which is the biggest continent? Who was Louis Armstrong? The second-grade volume advances to questions about Robin Hood, the Great Wall of China, counting to 100 and the human sperm and egg.

Fundamentally, Hirsch is aiming at a controversial objective: a national core curriculum for U.S. students. The professor created the Core Knowledge Foundation of Charlottesville, Va., which spent four years defining material for each grade. The Hirsch canon was tested last year at a Florida elementary school. The materials represent a consensus among hundreds of educators consulted by the foundation. "I do not believe there is such a thing as one best core knowledge," Hirsch says. "What's absolutely essential is getting political agreement about a specific core, so that we can get on with the job." One omission: Bible stories (teacher consultants deemed them unduly sectarian). However, Hirsch was careful to include facts and achievements concerning women, Native Americans, blacks and Hispanics.

Hirsch argues that the lack of a nationwide curriculum is itself an aspect of discrimination, since privileged youngsters are more likely to pick up essential knowledge even without help from schools. "Ours is a very, very unfair system," he asserts. His books represent one man's idiosyncratic attempt to change it.