Most people are familiar with E.D. Hirsch as the founder of Core Knowledge, a K-8 education program that runs in some 400 schools across the country. Core Knowledge offers an impressive curriculum that teachers love, but that many educators consider a reactionary initiative opposing all the best progressivist thinking in the field. This is a misconstruction, for while the curriculum endorses a central body of knowledge that all students should acquire, that body involves broad multicultural representations and includes among its motives a class orientation. Hirsch is, I believe, a lifelong Democrat, and his espousal of “cultural literacy” for kids stems not from an elite notion of culture and tradition, but from an observation about American society. The higher one goes in professional worlds, he maintains, the more cultural literacy is needed. It’s not a formal requirement, but it does form part of the social habitat of those spheres. If one doesn’t have a range of historical, literary, artistic, and civic reference at hand, one doesn’t seem to belong. That’s just the way things are, and instead of lamenting them, he has tried to equip all students to manage them. That position has set Hirsch at the center of several education controversies over the last 20 years (ever since the publication of his best-selling Cultural Literacy), idolized and vilified by turns.

Many people may not realize, however, that earlier in Hirsch’s career he stood at the center of another education debate, this one at the exact opposite end of the education scale. Back in the 1960s, after publishing a book on Wordsworth, Hirsch published several essays in literary theory that became tokens of a certain outlook on interpretation. (It is noteworthy how many mid-century theorists wrote important essays and books on Romantic poets as they were crafting their ideas — Hirsch, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Northrop Frye, Earl Wasserman, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom.) His works “Objective Interpretation” and “Validity in Interpretation” were key statements in the initial phase of Theory (around the years 1965 to 1975), and they were taken as the significant position contrary to that of “undecidability,” “aporia,” and other poststructuralist and postmodern uncertainties.

They were advanced statements, graduate-seminar kinds of treatments, and they set Hirsch at the forefront of literary study. He was at one of the best English departments in the country (I recall it was ranked 4th in one study when I entered grad school in the 1980s), and with New Literary History housed there it formed an important alternative to the Yale-Cornell-Hopkins network. There was no apparent reason for Hirsch to do anything else except stay on track, continue the theory debate, publish in Critical Inquiry, field job offers and lecture invitations, and train the next generation of literary critics and theorists.

But he changed focus and slid down the education ladder. After a few years in composition studies (and the book The Philosophy of Composition), he turned to primary education, dedicating his life, and lots of income, to improving the system.

I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery.

That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.