Impact

IMPACT
‘Powerful knowledge’, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of
IMPACT
literature in schools
T
here is no doubting the influence of E.D. Hirsch and Michael
Young on UK education policy and practice over the last ten
No.26
years. Hirsch’s notion of ‘cultural literacy’ and Young’s idea of
‘powerful knowledge’ are the theoretical drivers of a national shift to-
wards ‘knowledge-led’ or ‘knowledge-rich’ school curricula. Evidence of
this shift is plain to see in the current iteration of the National Curricu-
lum for England and in the mission statements of a growing number of Philosophical Perspectives on Education Policy
schools and academy trusts across the country.
According to Robert Eaglestone, however, there is a mistake
How to regulate faith schools

under the floorboards of the new, knowledge-rich curriculum. It
is a mistake that damages and distorts teaching in a number of
curriculum subjects, but Eaglestone – a literary critic and theorist –
focuses on its disastrous impact on the teaching of literature. Both
Hirsch and Young fall prey to scientism: they take knowledge in
‘Powerful knowledge’, ‘cultural
the natural sciences as a template for knowledge across the board.
Eaglestone shows first how scientism is baked into the theories of
literacy’ and the study of
‘cultural literacy’ and ‘powerful knowledge’, then how the adoption of
these theories in schools has disfigured and diminished the teaching literature in schools
of literature.
Eaglestone’s argument is arresting, timely and compelling. For Robert Eaglestone
those tasked with planning and teaching English curricula in schools,
Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, Adam Swift, Ruth Wareham

his penetrating analysis of where things have gone wrong and how
to put them right will be revelatory and transformative. And for
those concerned with curriculum theory and education policy more
generally, it will reinvigorate and reorient the debate about what
is helpful and what is not in the work of E.D. Hirsch and Michael
Young.
IMPACT
PESGB Ofﬁce, SAS Event Management
The Old George Brewery, Rollestone Street
Salisbury SP1 1DX
+44 (0)1722 339811
No.25
www.philosophy-of-education.org
IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 1 15/05/21 4:23 PM

2048416x, 2020, 26, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2048-416X.2020.12006.x by Nat Prov Indonesia, Wiley Online Library on [14/10/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
About IMPACT Previous titles in the series
Written by leading general philosophers and philosophers of education, IMPACT pamphlets IMPACT 25: How To Regulate Faith Schools, Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, Adam Swift
bring philosophical perspectives to bear on current education policy in the UK. They are and Ruth Wareham, October 2018
addressed directly to policy-makers, politicians and practitioners, though will be of interest
IMPACT 24: Why Character Education? Randall Curren, October 2017
also to researchers and students working on education policy.
IMPACT 23: Should Students Have To Borrow? Christopher Martin, May 2016
All IMPACT pamphlets are available to download free from the Wiley Online Library at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2048-416X IMPACT 22: What Training Do Teachers Need? Why theory is necessary to good teaching,
Janet Orchard and Christopher Winch, November 2015
IMPACT is an initiative of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB).
IMPACT 21: How Ought War To Be Remembered in Schools?, David Aldridge,
IMPACT Editorial Board November 2014
IMPACT 20: To Read or Not To Read? Decoding synthetic phonics,

Professor Michael Hand, University of Birmingham (Editor)
Andrew Davis, November 2013
Professor Carrie Winstanley, University of Roehampton (Launch Organiser) IMPACT 19: Patriotism in Schools, Michael Hand, December 2011
Professor Randall Curren, University of Rochester IMPACT 18: Education for Sustainable Development: a philosophical assessment,
Dr Andrew Davis, University of Durham Randall Curren, March 2009
Professor Bob Davis, University of Glasgow
IMPACT 17: Religious Education: taking religious difference seriously,
Dr Lorraine Foreman-Peck, University of Oxford
L. Philip Barnes, February 2009
Professor Liz Jackson, Education University of Hong Kong
Professor Michael Luntley, University of Warwick IMPACT 16: Educational Assessment and Accountability: a critique of current policy,
Dr Janet Orchard, University of Bristol Andrew Davis, October 2008
Professor Richard Smith, University of Durham
IMPACT 15: Intelligent Design Theory and Other Ideological Problems,
Professor John White, UCL Institute of Education
Mary Midgley, June 2007
Professor Chris Winch, King’s College London
IMPACT 14: What Schools Are For and Why, John White, January 2007
Copyright and Photocopying
IMPACT 13: The Visual Arts and Education, John Gingell, December 2006
Copyright © 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. All rights reserved. IMPACT 12: What Use is Educational Research? A debate, Robin Barrow and
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any Lorraine Foreman-Peck, December 2005
means without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holder.
IMPACT 11: Special Educational Needs: a new look, Mary Warnock, August 2005
ISSN 2048-4151 (Print)
IMPACT 10: The Importance of PSHE: a philosophical and policy perspective
ISSN 2048-416X (Online)
on Personal, Social and Health Education, Graham Haydon, March 2005
IMPACT 9: School Inspection in England: a re-appraisal, Colin Richards,

September 2001
IMPACT 8: Teaching Thinking Skills, Stephen Johnson, September 2001
IMPACT 7: Sex Education, David Archard, September 2000
IMPACT 6: Will the New National Curriculum Live Up to its Aims?, Steve Bramall
and John White, June 2000
IMPACT 5: Why Teach Foreign Languages in Schools? A philosophical response

to curriculum policy, Kevin Williams, June 2000
IMPACT 4: New Labour and the Future of Training, Christopher Winch, March 2000
IMPACT 3: Educational Equality and the New Selective Schooling, Harry Brighouse,
February 2000
IMPACT 2: Performance, Pay and Professionals: measuring the quality of teaching:

a challenge to the government’s proposals on teachers’ pay, Michael Luntley,
January 2000
IMPACT 1: Educational Assessment: a critique of current policy, Andrew Davis,

November 1999
IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 2 15/05/21 4:23 PM

About IMPACT Previous titles in the series
Written by leading general philosophers and philosophers of education, IMPACT pamphlets IMPACT 25: How To Regulate Faith Schools, Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, Adam Swift
bring philosophical perspectives to bear on current education policy in the UK. They are and Ruth Wareham, October 2018
addressed directly to policy-makers, politicians and practitioners, though will be of interest
IMPACT 24: Why Character Education? Randall Curren, October 2017
also to researchers and students working on education policy.
IMPACT 23: Should Students Have To Borrow? Christopher Martin, May 2016
All IMPACT pamphlets are available to download free from the Wiley Online Library at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2048-416X IMPACT 22: What Training Do Teachers Need? Why theory is necessary to good teaching,
Janet Orchard and Christopher Winch, November 2015
IMPACT is an initiative of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB).
IMPACT 21: How Ought War To Be Remembered in Schools?, David Aldridge,
IMPACT Editorial Board November 2014
IMPACT 20: To Read or Not To Read? Decoding synthetic phonics,

Professor Michael Hand, University of Birmingham (Editor)
Andrew Davis, November 2013
Professor Carrie Winstanley, University of Roehampton (Launch Organiser) IMPACT 19: Patriotism in Schools, Michael Hand, December 2011
Professor Randall Curren, University of Rochester IMPACT 18: Education for Sustainable Development: a philosophical assessment,
Dr Andrew Davis, University of Durham Randall Curren, March 2009
Professor Bob Davis, University of Glasgow
IMPACT 17: Religious Education: taking religious difference seriously,
Dr Lorraine Foreman-Peck, University of Oxford
L. Philip Barnes, February 2009
Professor Liz Jackson, Education University of Hong Kong
Professor Michael Luntley, University of Warwick IMPACT 16: Educational Assessment and Accountability: a critique of current policy,
Dr Janet Orchard, University of Bristol Andrew Davis, October 2008
Professor Richard Smith, University of Durham
IMPACT 15: Intelligent Design Theory and Other Ideological Problems,
Professor John White, UCL Institute of Education
Mary Midgley, June 2007
Professor Chris Winch, King’s College London
IMPACT 14: What Schools Are For and Why, John White, January 2007
Copyright and Photocopying
IMPACT 13: The Visual Arts and Education, John Gingell, December 2006
Copyright © 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. All rights reserved. IMPACT 12: What Use is Educational Research? A debate, Robin Barrow and
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any Lorraine Foreman-Peck, December 2005
means without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holder.
IMPACT 11: Special Educational Needs: a new look, Mary Warnock, August 2005
ISSN 2048-4151 (Print)
IMPACT 10: The Importance of PSHE: a philosophical and policy perspective
ISSN 2048-416X (Online)
on Personal, Social and Health Education, Graham Haydon, March 2005
IMPACT 9: School Inspection in England: a re-appraisal, Colin Richards,

September 2001
IMPACT 8: Teaching Thinking Skills, Stephen Johnson, September 2001
IMPACT 7: Sex Education, David Archard, September 2000
IMPACT 6: Will the New National Curriculum Live Up to its Aims?, Steve Bramall
and John White, June 2000
IMPACT 5: Why Teach Foreign Languages in Schools? A philosophical response

to curriculum policy, Kevin Williams, June 2000
IMPACT 4: New Labour and the Future of Training, Christopher Winch, March 2000
IMPACT 3: Educational Equality and the New Selective Schooling, Harry Brighouse,
February 2000
IMPACT 2: Performance, Pay and Professionals: measuring the quality of teaching:

a challenge to the government’s proposals on teachers’ pay, Michael Luntley,
January 2000
IMPACT 1: Educational Assessment: a critique of current policy, Andrew Davis,

November 1999
IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 2 15/05/21 4:23 PM

No. 26
Contents
Editorial introduction 2
Overview 5
1. Introduction: the mistake under the floorboards 7

2. Different kinds of knowledge 10
3. The chemistry of ‘powerful knowledge’ 14
4. The scientism of ‘cultural literacy’ 18
5. Practical consequences in the classroom 25
6. Subject-centred education and disciplinary 30
thinking
7. Some policy suggestions 34
8. Conclusion 36
References 37
About the author 41
1
Impact 26. Powerful knowledge and cultural literacy
Editorial introduction
T
here is no doubting the influence of E.D. Hirsch and Michael
Young on UK education policy and practice over the last
ten years. Hirsch’s notion of ‘cultural literacy’ and Young’s idea of
‘powerful knowledge’ are the theoretical drivers of a national shift
towards ‘knowledge-led’ or ‘knowledge-rich’ school curricula. Evidence
of this shift is plain to see in the current iteration of the National
Curriculum for England and in the mission statements of a growing
number of schools and academy trusts across the country. Some have
detected ‘qualified support’ (Ashman 2019) for it in Ofsted’s new
Education Inspection Framework, with its commitment to judging
schools on the extent to which their curricula are ‘designed to give all
learners the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life’
(Ofsted 2019).
What followers of Hirsch and Young are determined to root out is a
curricular focus on skills or processes. This is made especially clear by
Nick Gibb, Minister of State for School Standards, in his candid essay
‘How E.D. Hirsch came to shape UK government policy’ (Gibb 2015).
Gibb explains how reading Hirsch provided him with the ‘mental
armour’ to fight the ‘arrant nonsense’ of ‘personal, learning and thinking
skills’ (p.13). And he is scathing of the previous iteration of the National
Curriculum, in which there was almost ‘no mention’ of specific events or
© 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain
locations in the programmes of study for History and Geography, and a

preoccupation with such processes as ‘using evidence’, ‘communicating
about the past’ and ‘geographical enquiry’ (pp.15-16).
In one sense, then, the educational theories of Hirsch and Young are
just old wine in new bottles: the latest formulations of arguments
traditionalists have been making for decades in their battle with
progressives over whether schools should prioritise knowledge or skills,
facts or processes, content or methods.
2
But this, says Robert Eaglestone, is not the whole story. Setting aside
the familiar debate about knowledge and skills, Eaglestone diagnoses a
malady in the theories of Hirsch and Young that should worry
traditionalists and progressives alike. It is a malady that damages and
distorts teaching in a number of curriculum subjects, but Eaglestone – a
literary critic and theorist – focuses on its disastrous impact on the
teaching of literature. Thanks to Hirsch and Young, he contends,
‘something is rotten in the state of English’.
On Eaglestone’s view, the real problem with ‘cultural literacy’ and
‘powerful knowledge’ is not their traditionalism but their scientism. Both
take knowledge in the natural sciences as a template for knowledge across
the board. Eaglestone shows first how scientism is baked into these two
theories, then how their adoption in schools has disfigured and
diminished the teaching of literature. Finally, he proposes a solution to
the problem: the teaching of literature in schools should be guided not by
Hirschian and Youngian conceptions of knowledge, but by the deep
understandings and signature pedagogies of the discipline of literary
criticism.
Eaglestone’s argument is arresting, timely and compelling. For those
tasked with planning and teaching English curricula in schools, his
penetrating analysis of where things have gone wrong and how to put
them right will be revelatory and transformative. And for those
concerned with curriculum theory and education policy more generally,
it will reinvigorate and reorient the debate about what is helpful and what
is not in the work of E.D. Hirsch and Michael Young.
******
This is the twenty-sixth IMPACT pamphlet. Written by leading
general philosophers and philosophers of education, the IMPACT series
brings philosophical perspectives to bear on education policy in the UK.
Pamphlets are addressed to policy-makers, politicians and practitioners,
though will be of interest also to researchers and students whose work has
a policy focus. IMPACT is an initiative of the Philosophy of Education
Society of Great Britain.

Previous pamphlets have tackled issues across the spectrum of
education policy. Pamphlets on the organisation, management and
distribution of schooling include Harry Brighouse’s on educational
equality, Michael Luntley’s on performance-related pay, Mary Warnock’s
on provision for pupils with special educational needs, and Janet Orchard
and Christopher Winch’s on initial teacher education. New perspectives
on curriculum subjects are set out in Kevin Williams’ pamphlet on
3
modern foreign languages, John Gingell’s on the visual arts, Philip

Barnes’ on religious education and Andrew Davis’ on the teaching of
reading. And ways for schools to address challenging topics in the public
eye are explored in Mary Midgley’s pamphlet on intelligent design theory,
David Archard’s on sex education, Michael Hand’s on patriotism, and
Randall Curren’s on character education. A full list of previous titles can
be found at the end of this pamphlet.
Each IMPACT pamphlet is launched with a seminar or panel debate at
which the issues it raises are further explored. Launches have been
attended by government ministers, shadow ministers and other MPs, by
representatives of government departments, non-departmental public
bodies, professional associations, trade unions and think tanks, by
education journalists and researchers, and by teachers and students.
IMPACT pamphlets express the ideas of their authors only. They do
not represent the views of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain. The Society has several hundred members whose ideas and
political allegiances are widely disparate.
Michael Hand
IMPACT Editor
4
Overview
• The teaching of English literature in the UK today is being

distorted by a profound philosophical mistake about the nature of
knowledge. This has real in-the-classroom consequences.
• There are different kinds of knowledge. Aristotle famously
identified five different kinds, but it’s easy to see that, say, knowing
in theory how to kick a football and knowing how actually to kick
a football are different.
• Different disciplines grow from these different kinds of
knowledge. The kind of knowledge that underlies the study of
literature is embedded in the National Curriculum. We calculate
the solution to an equation but we deliberate together the meaning
of a poem; a physicist discovers an answer but a literary critic
persuades of an opinion.
• ‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ dominate education
and education policy. They take science as their model for
knowledge and assume that all knowledge in education should be
like scientific knowledge. But this model of knowledge deforms
the study and teaching of literature. While science is one of the
great wonders of our species, this misapplication is an example of
scientism, the mission-creep of scientific ideas from their right
realm to a wider world.
• This misapplication is clear in the case of Michael Young’s

‘powerful knowledge’, clearly a proxy for scientific knowledge.
Approaches based on ‘powerful knowledge’ in the study of
literature cannot address the student’s own experience of
literature, crucial for the discipline, nor the values which orient
any understanding of literature, nor the central role of critical
judgement.
• ‘Cultural literacy’ has its origins in E.D. Hirsch’s literary theory of
the late 1950s, which attempted to remake literary knowledge as if
5
it were scientific knowledge. I analyse this deep structure in his

thought and demonstrate how the attempt to make the study of
literature into a science is incoherent. I show how this core, flawed
idea went on to underlie ‘cultural literacy’ in its current version
and how it does not deliver the National Curriculum for English.
• I show how these apparently abstract philosophical debates have
practical, in-the-classroom impacts which deform aspects of how
we teach literature. For example, they offer an incorrect version of
how we interpret literary texts which encourages ‘feature spotting’
and an overemphasis on mastering vocabulary. They also lead to a
right-or-wrong-answers approach which contradicts the National
Curriculum, relies on simplistic misapplications of historical
context, fosters a bad version of direct instruction and devalues
the learner’s own creative reading.
• In contrast, I suggest a subject-centred education which develops
disciplinary thinking. Disciplines form the people who work
within and for them, are ever-evolving traditions, and have
signature pedagogies, ways of teaching that reflect both the
practitioner and the developing tradition of the discipline. I offer a
practical account of a recent pedagogical project which embodies
this tradition of disciplinary thinking.
• I suggest that we need to rebalance our national conversation
about teaching: from the language of ‘powerful knowledge’ and
‘cultural literacy’ to the significance of disciplines and how they
shape and understand their field. I call this ‘disciplinary
consciousness’.
6
1. Introduction: the
mistake under the
floorboards
T
his pamphlet tells the story of a mistake which is having
a destructive impact on the teaching of English literature and the
humanities more widely in this county. After telling that story, I
will suggest some steps we can take to repair the damage.
This mistake is not caused by people behaving stupidly or wickedly.
Everyone in this story, from teachers in the classroom to Tory ministers
to left-wing academics, are doing their best for the children in the UK. So
the mistake I’m going to analyse isn’t a political one, in the usual way you
might expect. This pamphlet is not part of the continual left-right
he-said-she-said row between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’
educationalists.
The mistake is a philosophical error at the deepest level, which has,
almost unrecognised, bubbled up into our everyday educational work.
The very down-to-earth philosopher Mary Midgley once compared
philosophy to plumbing. Hidden beneath the floorboards of our kitchens,
she suggested, and under the surface of cultures, is a complicated system
– pipes or ideas – which remains unnoticed until something goes wrong.
When the plumbing is broken, water swamps the kitchen floor or pours
through the ceiling. When philosophical concepts go wrong, she said,
they ‘quietly distort and obstruct our thinking’ (Midgley 1996, p.2).
Following her example, this pamphlet is a work of philosophical plumbing.
At the moment, education in English literature is distorted and
obstructed. To explain why, I am going to take you deep under the
floorboards, and then I’m going to suggest how we might fix the pipes.
7
So, what is the problem? Something is rotten in the state of English.

Students and teachers talk about ‘exam’ English, ‘manufactured reading’
and becoming ‘invalid’ or ‘inauthentic’ readers (Bleiman 2020; Giovanelli
and Mason 2015; Jamshidi 2016). Teachers
Teachers feel uneasy feel uneasy when strong-armed into making
when strong-armed into students use strange, esoteric literary terms,
making students use which no author ever uses and which actually
make understanding a poem harder. Teachers feel
strange, esoteric literary anxious, too, when education experts tell them that
terms, which no author learning vocabulary is the first step in appreciating
a piece of literature. They feel there is a mismatch
ever uses between new methods of learning, new curricula
and the subject itself. Examiners and inspectors feel a similar unease
when looking at new learning plans championed by many senior
management teams which seem hardly to focus on literature – on, say,
narrative, style, plot, character – but instead assume that dates and
simplistic versions of historical facts are what’s necessary to understand a
novel, or that drill can teach the meaning of a poem. A version of the
same malaise is felt across the humanities. Something underneath our
education system has gone wrong.
‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ are the two overlapping
and complementary ideas that have dominated education and education
policy for well over a decade.
‘Powerful knowledge’, a term coined by the curriculum theorist
Michael Young, successfully changed the focus of education away from
the student or the skills they need to learn to the idea of knowledge. It is a
touchstone for politicians, OFSTED, academics and teachers. It underlies
curriculum reform, books by educational gurus and the way teachers are
taught. I’ll explore what it is and what it means in more detail when I tell
Michael Young’s story.
‘Cultural literacy’ has been even more influential. The American
professor of English and Education E. D. Hirsch began discussing ‘cultural
literacy’ in the early 1980s, although, as I’ll show, his core idea dates back
to the late 1950s. He and other advocates of ‘cultural literacy’ argue that
an explicit, fact-based, tightly-designed and delivered curriculum helps
individuals learn and is especially good for those from disadvantaged
backgrounds. More, they maintain that a shared and generally recognised
national curriculum is crucial for a cohesive nation-state. An essay by
Nick Gibb MP, then Minister for Schools, simply called ‘How E.D. Hirsch
came to shape UK government policy’ (Gibb 2015), begins: ‘No single
writer has influenced my thinking on education more than E.D. Hirsch’
(p.12). Once in government in 2010, he and Michael Gove set about
8
reforming the curriculum in ‘Hirschian terms’ (p.13). For Gibb, Hirsch

was ‘the wellspring for innovative and challenging ideas amongst new
generation of British educators’ (sic) (p.17): ideas like ‘intellectual capital’,
the ‘education thoughtworld’ and ‘the supposed split between facts and
skills’ (p.17) come from Hirsch’s work. I’ll explore ‘cultural literacy’ when
I tell the story of Hirsch’s intellectual journey.
‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ have provoked a great deal
of controversy. Educationalists and politicians choose one side or the
other. But my argument is different. These ideas are not wrong in any
simple way and I’m not suggesting that we take up all the floorboards,
pull out all the pipework and start again. But a crucial and core aspect of
them both means they are corroding the teaching and learning of English
literature.
The problem is this. Both ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’
rely on one model of what knowledge is. As I’ll show, there are different
kinds of knowledge, as the very existence of different subjects implies.
The kind of knowledge for which ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural
literacy’ advocate is not the same as the kind of knowledge which
underlies the study of literature. This means that education policy,
curriculum design and pedagogy based on ‘powerful knowledge’ or
‘cultural literacy’ does not fit the teaching of literature and so cannot
properly deliver the National Curriculum for English. Learning about
equations, coastal erosion and Shakespeare’s plays is not just learning
different data but learning different kinds of knowledge and dispositions:
‘can you calculate the result of the equation?’ is not the same sort of
question as ‘do you understand the poem?’.
Like E.D. Hirsch, I am a literary critic who specialises in literary
theory, interested in the ideas that lie deep within both the literary and
non-literary texts we read. It is with the ideas about knowledge deep
within ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ that my story begins.
9
2. Different kinds of
knowledge
‘W
hat is knowledge?’ is the sort of abstract question that
philosophers in the West have argued over for two and
half millennia. But, in this context, I’m going to focus on
one pretty obvious idea. Knowing in theory how to kick a football,
knowing how actually to kick a football, knowing precisely the right
moment to deploy those skills, knowing how to play well in a team,
knowing how to have the right attitude and knowing the history of your
club all demonstrate different kinds of knowledge.
This idea that there are different kinds of knowledge is ancient.
Aristotle named five different sorts. Roughly, episteme is knowledge of
eternal things that can be taught: universal principles like π in maths or
the equations that underlie physics. Sophia combines this with working
out why unchanging things are the way they are: the discovery of first
principles. Both these are akin to what we call the natural sciences, and
Aristotle’s work on these is why it is often claimed he invented science.
But there is also knowledge of things that change, that are ‘inside’ time.
Techne means knowing how to do something, knowing your way around
something: philosophers always choose the example of knowing how to
make a pair of shoes, but it works for knowing how to kick a football
accurately, how to play an instrument, how to write a formal letter or an

essay. Phronesis, sometimes translated as practical wisdom, is about
working out what action to take in the world, ‘concerned with things
human and things about which it is possible to deliberate’ (Aristotle
1141b 5). Thinking your way around a situation in life, deliberating it
with your friends, is not the same as discovering the mathematical truths
about the circumference of a circle. It involves values, other people,
decisions that are judgements and not calculations, uncertainties.
10
Phronesis is about knowing how to work as a team, how to perform with

others, things that are learned through experience. Finally, there is nous,
which basically means working out abstract principles (a light-hearted
illustration: when he sees it’s raining outside the back door, my cat runs
expectantly to the front door, because, lacking nous, he can’t abstract the
idea that it’s drizzling all over his little kingdom).
Different philosophers make different distinctions: Gilbert Ryle
famously discussed ‘knowing how and knowing that’ (Ryle 1990, p.26);
and in the philosophy of education, Paul Hirst developed an approach
based on the ‘diversity of the forms’ (Hirst 1974, p.84) of human
knowledge and understanding. There are more, of course (see, for
example, Gascoigne and Thornton 2013). But the key point here is that
there are profound differences not just of content but of kind.
These different kinds of knowledge emerge in education. Even in Year
7 at school, the sciences will be teaching something that more closely
matches episteme and sophia and the humanities something closer to
techne and phronesis. We calculate the solution to an equation but we
deliberate together the meaning of a poem; a student obeys the strict rules
of deduction for a chemistry experiment but adapts models and examples
to write a literary essay or poem; a physicist discovers an answer but a
critic persuades of an opinion; we recall data and information but we grow
to understand meaning.
The National Curriculum unquestionably recognises the kind of
knowledge that English offers and its differences from the sciences. It says
that ‘English has a pre-eminent place in education and in society’ because
it allows us to communicate ‘ideas and emotions to others’ and develops
students ‘culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually’
(DfE 2013, p.3). We all use the content of English every day when we tell
stories or make jokes, and when we think about our own emotions and
our selves. We interpret texts and make value and aesthetic judgements
all the time while looking at advertisements, newspapers and social
media posts as well as novels, films, poems and plays. English is a
form of techne, a knowing how, a knowing your
English is a form of
way around: how to write ‘accurately, fluently,

techne, a knowing how, effectively and at length for pleasure and
information’ (p.3); how to argue, explain and
a knowing your way tell stories; how to read responsively, with
around appreciation, evaluation and understanding.
English is a form of phronesis, too, learnt from
doing things together, arguing, listening to other people’s points of view,
‘working effectively in groups’, ‘listening to and building on the
contributions of others’, and ‘recognising that other responses to a text are
11
possible and evaluating these’ (p.7). You can’t do English by yourself and
when you discuss books with others, you are doing the subject most
authentically. These discussions are not an addition, like exclaiming
‘wow!’ when you see magnesium fizz in water during a chemistry lesson,
but are an integral part of the discipline: learning to deliberate well. In
English, knowledge is made by all the people in the classroom together as
they develop their own ‘ideas and emotions’ and do not simply recall
things deposited or drilled into them. The experience of being moved (or
left stony-hearted or bored) by a story is part of the educative process in
English; by contrast, admiring the elegance of an equation is not part of
applying it. English is mandated to reach out to pleasure, to values and to
the imagination. And the end points for literary education are not set:
students should learn to choose and read ‘books independently for
challenge, interest and enjoyment’ (p.3) and make their own evaluations.
English draws on experiences, values and judgements. There is
something like episteme in English – factual knowledge of dates, for
example – but this is far from the core of the discipline.
These ideas about English are not radical or progressive. They are in
the National Curriculum and embody the evolving way the subject has
been conceived and taught for about a century. Perhaps these
deeply-intuited differences between the sciences and the humanities are
rarely explicitly discussed because we don’t often think of knowledge as
having different forms; or perhaps because the current wave of
pedagogical theory encourages us to think of knowledge solely as data to
be recalled, like bytes on your hard drive.
Now we are in a position to understand even more clearly the
philosophical error with which I began.
‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ conceive of knowledge in
one way only: as what Aristotle called episteme, the kind of knowledge
which characterises the natural sciences. Against the ideas which underlie
the National Curriculum, ‘powerful knowledge’ assumes and ‘cultural
literacy’ demands that this scientific model of knowledge extend to the
study of literature. This is what is distorting the teaching of literature.
Science is one of the great wonders of our species and everyone should
have an education in it. C.P. Snow, in his famous ‘Two Cultures’ lecture
(Snow 1993), was right to argue that those ignorant of science are only
half-literate. But scientism is the mission-creep of scientific ideas from
their right realm of understanding nature into a wider world. The
philosopher Peter Winch warned against ‘the extra-scientific pretensions
of science’ (Winch 1991, p.2). ‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’
are examples of this. This scientism is exacerbated by the way that the
metaphor of computing dominates our educational discourse.
12
Conversations in pedagogy have become about information and its

retrieval, not about meaning: they assume memory to be a kind of
computer storage device, taking in and passing back digital information,
rather than a core part of what it is to be human. Scientific knowledge
might be of this sort but knowledge in the interpretive humanities is not.
The next sections demonstrate the consequences of this scientism in
detail.
13
3. The chemistry of
‘powerful knowledge’
T
he story of Michael Young’s career – leftist radical to key
Conservative government adviser – is often told as a kind of
‘conversion narrative’ from progressive to traditional education.
He began as a chemistry teacher. However, he soon saw that social
conditions often prevented his students from learning, so he retrained to
investigate the sociology of education. Inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed (Freire 2000), he concluded that the model of education
which simply dumped education into students’ heads was wrong.
Believing instead that the curriculum should be centred on the learner, he
became a champion for progressive education.
Young changed his mind. He tells the story of a job offer from a
‘learner-centred’ school. The head teacher said to him: ‘Remember, when
pupils complain about a teacher, I always put the students’ views first’
(Young and Lambert 2014, p.50). He turned the job down: ‘how could I
be head of a science department, if the head gave more authority to the
pupils who came to school almost certainly knowing no science than to
his specialist science teachers?’ (p.50). (I find the telling of this story very
revealing because Young conflates his authority as a teacher with his
authority as a scientist. Knowing about science is not the same as being a
teacher: teachers know more than the facts of their disciplines.)

Reflecting on this, Young came to think that to focus on the student,
rather than the knowledge taught, was harmful.
But actually, from the point of view of what knowledge is, Young has
never changed his mind. ‘Powerful knowledge’ is the same sort of
knowledge as science, simply expanded from chemistry to all the subjects
in the curriculum.
14
This is absolutely clear from how Young describes ‘powerful

knowledge’. Like science, he argues it is ‘true’ and ‘real’ (Young and
Muller 2016, p. 124); like science, it is value-free in itself; it is predictive,
systematic, and revisable following agreed-upon criteria, as science is
(according to Karl Popper, anyway: see also Belas 2019). ‘Powerful
knowledge’ advances over time so each generation knows more than the
previous one. And like science, ‘powerful knowledge’ is in principle
accessible to all but actually has become increasingly specialised. A
consequence of all this is that ‘powerful knowledge’ does not rely on
personal experience: for Young, the experiences pupils brings to school
and the conceptual knowledge they get from the
for Young, the curriculum are profoundly different. He explains
experiences pupils with an example, taken from the geography
brings to school and the curriculum:
conceptual knowledge pupils’ relationships with the ‘concept’ of a

they get from the city should be different to their relationship
with their ‘experience’ of London as
curriculum are the city where they live. It is important that
profoundly different the pupils do not confuse the London that
the geography teacher talks about with the
London in which they live. To a certain extent, it is the same city,
but the pupils’ relationship with it in the two cases is not the
same. The London where they live is ‘a place of experience’.
London as an example of a city is ‘an object of thought’ or a
‘concept’. (Young and Lambert 2014, p.98)
All these characteristics – true, real, value-free, revisable, specialised,

opposed to experience – mean that ‘powerful knowledge’ is really a
version of scientific knowledge, parallel to episteme in Aristotle. But this
is not how the study of literature works, and looking at three core areas of
the discipline – experience, value and judgement – shows this very clearly.
First, in relation to the students’ own experience. Young’s insistence
that the focus should be on the knowledge not the knowers may be right
for science: scientists are suspicious of letting our everyday experience
guide the development of scientific knowledge. But this idea makes the
humanities incoherent. Famously, Maya Angelou, an African-American
girl poverty, said that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with
fortune and men’s eyes/ I all alone beweep my outcast state’) spoke to her
so profoundly she knew that ‘William Shakespeare was a black woman’
(Angelou 1985). The experience of reading the poetry, not the sonnet as
‘an object of thought’, moved her. To demonstrate this mismatch really
15
clearly, I’m going to use a technique from English – ‘creative/critical

rewriting’ – to reimagine the paragraph from Young cited above. It shows
how bizarre his ideas are for the study of literature:
pupils’ relationships with the ‘concept’ of the play Hamlet should

be different to their relationship with their ‘experience’ of Hamlet
as the play they have seen or read. It is important that the pupils
do not confuse the Hamlet that the English teacher talks about
with the Hamlet they have experienced. To a certain extent it is
the same play, but the pupils’ relationship with it in the two cases
is not the same. The Hamlet they have seen or read is ‘a place of
experience’. Hamlet in the classroom is ‘an object of thought’ or a
‘concept’.
This division between literature as experience and literature as

‘classroom object’ is just incoherent for English. The knowledge is in and
arises from the personal experience, as the National Curriculum
recognises in asking students to ‘make an informed personal response’
(DfE 2013, p.5). Of course, studying a play develops and deepens a
student’s knowledge: but this knowledge begins in the experience of
seeing or reading it. Teaching grows this knowledge in dialogue by
helping the student articulate, reflect on, adapt and mature their view.
The alternative, in the worst tradition of ‘assessment-itis’, is simply trying
to drill students, parrot-fashion, with what they should think, feel and say
about a work of literature, which betrays both the discipline and the point
of literature. Indeed, forcing students to mimic beliefs they do not hold
and that do not correspond to their experience is the best way to put
them off literature altogether – and so fails in the curriculum’s aim to
create a ‘love of literature’ (p.3).
Second, Young’s ‘powerful knowledge’, like the idea of science on
which is it based, is value-free. Yet Young writes, a bit awkwardly, that ‘we
need knowledge to live in a complex world but we cannot live by
knowledge – we live by beliefs in what we value’ (Young and Lambert
2014, p.20). To separate the idea of values and beliefs from the study of
literature again makes it incoherent. At a superficial level, there are
implicit or explicit aesthetic values which guide, say, a cabinet minister in
their choice of literary examples in a speech or an English department in
their choice of a book for a year group to study. But at a deeper level, great
literary texts pose questions about values. Is it better to be, or not to be?
Values are how we orient our discussions of literature: exploring
Macbeth’s ambition or asking if a character is right to fall in love relies
precisely on values and questions about values. Without understanding
16
that Satan is evil – a value judgement – Paradise Lost makes no sense. The
study of literature is where we discuss, compare and discover our values:
it is value-rich. Indeed, politicians and others seek to shape the subject
precisely because it transmits values. ‘Powerful knowledge’ takes this
aspect away from the study of literature. (One could also point out that
the good reasons Young gives for his advocacy of ‘powerful knowledge’ –
social justice, freedom – are paradoxically values of the sort that he
suggests ‘powerful knowledge’ should not teach.)
Third, judgement. Students in the sciences are taught the criteria and
tools to make calculations. These criteria – equations or complex
scientific methods – correctly applied produce correct answers. No one
doubts that speed equals distance divided by time. ‘Powerful knowledge’
wishes the same for the humanities. Young writes irritably of how the
ethical and aesthetic disciplines cannot prove their judgements like
scientific calculations, ‘even’ – he sounds frustrated – ‘in terms of their
own criteria’ (Young and Muller 2016, p.123). But students in the
humanities are not taught to make right-or-wrong calculations but
persuasive judgements (you do not calculate the answer as to why Hamlet
delays his vengeance). More, in learning to make these judgements – a
vital skill for the world of work, incidentally – students also learn to
investigate and interrogate the criteria by which judgements are made.
This kind of critical self-reflection is central to the traditions of
knowledge in the humanities, although it might look ridiculous in a
chemistry classroom: while no Year 9 student questions the basis of
columns of the periodic table, she might well want to know why she
studies some books rather than others.
As I’ve shown with the three areas of experience, value and judgement,
the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ may fit teaching in the natural
sciences but does not fit the subject of English literature. In fact, the
curriculum theorist inspired by ‘powerful knowledge’ just does not see
the kinds of knowledge that English teaches as knowledge at all, and so
rules them out of the curriculum. This leads to the distortion of the
subject. Well-intentioned teachers, responding to the demands of their
senior management teams, try to teach English as if it were chemistry.

The National Curriculum, citing Matthew Arnold, instructs schools to
introduce ‘pupils to the best that has been thought and said’: this clearly
fits uneasily with the claim of ‘powerful knowledge’ to be ‘better than the
knowledge of previous generations’ (Young and Lambert 2014, p.16).
Pupils need scientific knowledge, but not all knowledge, not the best that
has been thought and said, is scientific.
17
4. The scientism of
‘cultural literacy’
T
he case that ‘powerful knowledge’ is misapplied to English looks
straightforward. By contrast, ‘cultural literacy’, with its origin
in the work of a professor of English, E.D. Hirsch, sounds as if it
might be a better fit with the National Curriculum. As I’ll demonstrate, it
is not. If Young takes scientific knowledge as his model and misapplies it
to literary studies, Hirsch tries something both more subtle and more
ambitious: to remake literary and cultural knowledge as if it were
scientific knowledge.
Hirsch began in the late 1950s as a literary theorist. His first major
article, ‘Objective interpretation’ (1960), concerned hermeneutics, that is,
the nature of interpretation. It was followed up by two books Validity in
Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976) which had
little impact on the academic discipline of English. The second phase of
his career, from the early 1980s, was as an educational theorist. Following
work with cognitive scientists at his university, he developed and
advocated for ‘cultural literacy’. This made him a global figure in
education. These two phases of his career have a deep but hidden
continuity. At the core of both is a form of scientism, the extension of
scientific ideas to things outside their realm. Hirsch is explicit about this:
he believes that the ‘much-advertised cleavage between thinking in the

sciences and the humanities does not exist’ (Hirsch 1967, p.264). His
early career attempts to recast knowledge of literature as scientific
knowledge; his later career remakes knowledge of national culture in the
model of scientific knowledge. I’m going to explain why and how he does
this, and why and how it fails. This is a complex bit of intellectual
plumbing – going deep under the floorboards – but it is important to
18
show how his whole story, including ‘cultural literacy’, is shaped by this
core idea in order to see the practical consequences.
The young Hirsch in the late 1950s thought that the study of literature
was in a mess: ‘a playground for the jousting of opinions, fancies, and
private preferences’ (Hirsch 1967, p.163), where the talk was not of
knowledge but values. He wanted to make knowledge about the meaning
of literature as secure as knowledge in the natural sciences. To do this, he
tried to apply scientific methodology, what he called the
‘hypothetico-deductive process’ (p.264), to the study of literature. He
named this process ‘validation’ and argued that, once ‘validated’, the
meaning of a poem, novel or play could be permanently ‘established
objectively like other forms of knowledge’ (p.163). This transmutation of
literary into scientific knowledge, of phronesis and techne into episteme,
involves three steps, each laid out in detail in Validity in Interpretation.
First, Hirsch chose what knowledge the disciple of English should
seek: he was looking for a single ‘determinate object’ (p.163) of meaning.
He decided that ‘the meaning of a text is the author’s meaning’ (p.25). In
choosing this, Hirsch purposively swum against the tide. The main
current in literary criticism, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s thought on literature
in the 1920s, argued against the importance of the author’s intention in
understanding a literary text. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous article
‘The intentional fallacy’ both summed up years of critical thought and
clearly laid out a critical principle: ‘the design or intention of the author is
neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a
work of literary art’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946, p.468). Turning to ‘the
author’s intention’ was not what literary critics should do, they concluded,
because ‘critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle’ (p.488).
But Hirsch’s reasons for choosing authorial intention as a principle were
not just to roll back a generation of disciplinary thought. While he argued
that authorial intention is ‘sensible’ (Hirsch 1967, p.1) and ‘universally
compelling and generally sharable’ (p.25), he also admits he chose it on
‘purely practical grounds’ (p.25), a flag around which people could rally, a
‘standard to govern our interpretive practice’ (Cain 1977, p.337). Hirsch
knew that any reader can choose any interpretation to judge a book (as
demonstrated in Ed Zern’s famous joke-review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in Field and Stream, which argued that one had to wade through the dull
affair between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper to get to the really
fascinating and important discussions on the management of a Midlands
shooting estate). His choice of authorial intention was underlain by the
fear that if ‘the meaning of the text is not the author’s, then no
interpretation can correspond to the meaning of the text’ (Hirsch 1967,
p.5, original italics). Choosing ‘what the author meant’, he believes, can
19
lead the critic to discover a single unambiguous meaning, the meaning of

a literary text, just as an equation or experiment has only one true result.
He chose authorial intention because it looks as if you can calculate the
meaning of a text, rather than persuade someone of it.
Hirsch’s second step in making English more like a natural science
was to reduce a literary text to very basic units. One aspect of science
works by atomisation or reduction, finding the smallest constituent parts:
sub-atomic particles in physics, for example. Hirsch wanted to do the
same, atomising a text into ‘units of meaning’ studied ‘in isolation from
other parts of the text’ (p.94, original italics). Each tiny unit is given its
‘permanent’ (Hirsch 1984, p.216) meaning ‘before anything can be said
about its wider relationships or values’ (Hirsch 1967, p.162). But to create
these tiny ‘units of meaning’ in literature in the first place, Hirsch makes
an idiosyncratic distinction between meaning and significance. In Validity
in Interpretation, meaning is ‘what the author meant by his use of a
particular sign sequence’ (Hirsch 1967, p.8) while significance is the
‘relationship between that meaning and a person, a conception, or a
situation’ (p.8). To explain what Hirsch means: imagine digging
something up from the soil. Its basic presence – its meaning, for Hirsch –
is the fact that it is an Anglo-Saxon helmet, but different people will draw
different significances from it: for an archaeologist, the helmet is crucial
evidence about an eighth century warlord, but for a treasure-hunter it’s
money and, for a poet, it’s a metaphor for the passage of time. But this
division between meaning and significance doesn’t work in matters of
interpretation and so not for literature. The ‘wider relationships or values’,
the ‘significance’ that Hirsch thinks we add to the tiny, isolated units of
meaning, are, in fact, necessary to establish that meaning in the first
place. That is, the archaeologist, treasure-hunter and poet must already
have a sense of what is significant in order to make meaning; they must
be looking for or sensitised to ancient remains: it is this sense of
significance that allows them to tell the ancient helmet from a tin can in
the first place. We don’t come across ‘to be or not to be’ by accident,
isolated from the rest of the text, and work out what it might mean in the
abstract (as a computer might): we come

To use Hirsch’s terms across it in the context of both Hamlet and our
against him: significance lives, and that already shapes what we think about
it. To use Hirsch’s terms against him: significance
shapes meaning and shapes meaning and meaning shapes significance,
meaning shapes in a virtuous circle. This idea, which is central
significance, in a to literary interpretation, has a name: hermeneutic
circularity. It is the way that the big picture helps us
virtuous circle see the detail, and the detail helps us compose the
20
big picture. Hirsch explicitly rejects hermeneutic circularity, arguing that

it is ‘a fundamental difficulty of interpretation which hinders any neat
formulation of correct methodology’ (p.164). As I’ll show later, his
rejection of this basic idea has important and practical classroom
consequences.
Hirsch’s third and final step builds on the previous two. Having chosen
the author’s intention as the object of knowledge and separated it from
what he thinks of as extraneous significances, he introduces the idea of
‘validation’. It’s explicitly scientific: he originally called it ‘verification’, to
echo Karl Popper’s term in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, but decided
that this was too ‘definitive-sounding’ (Hirsch 1967, p.171, my italics). But
despite Hirsch’s repeated and grandiose claims for this process, how it
actually works is hazy. ‘Every interpretation begins’ he writes ‘as a guess’
(p.170). Validation is the judgement or ‘adjudication’ (p.172) on that
guess, which works by comparing all the possible interpretations to reach
an ‘objective conclusion’ (p.172). This is a parody of the scientific
method: making a hypothesis and testing it. But unlike, say, a chemist
conducting an experiment, it’s unclear how such judgements are made: a
long digression on the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher reveals (bizarrely, given his argument) for Hirsch that ‘no
possible set of rules… can generate or compel an insight into what an
author means’ (p.203). So, right at the core of his attempt to make literary
knowledge like scientific knowledge is an admission that this is not
possible. Despite this Hirsch continues: the result of a properly conducted
scientific experiment should compel people to agree by force of reason.
By contrast, Hirsch writes, since the ‘objectivity of such knowledge about
texts’ can be disputed, English the subject is ‘marred’ by arguments
without final adjudication (p.206). Because of this, Hirsch outlines a kind
of court-of-literary-meaning, a ‘ruthless critical process’ (p.206), in which
literary critics bring evidence and argue for an interpretation, and a
critic-judge rules as to which interpretation is finally and permanently
correct. (This seems so ridiculous, I wondered at first if Hirsch meant it
as a satire: but he sounds pretty serious.) He writes that while some
‘uncritical or fractious souls might stubbornly refuse to assent to

conclusions so reached’, this ‘does not exclude such conclusions from the
domain of genuine knowledge’ (pp.206-7). A commentator notes that
some may welcome this system ‘for its promise of a return to rigid
authority and discipline’, but because Hirsch offers no specifics about how
judges will be chosen, how appeals might work, how the rules of evidence
might change and what might prevent an ‘intellectual tyranny’, ‘Hirsch’s
theory is in many respects bluntly authoritarian’ (Cain 1977, p.341).
Hirsch’s court resembles the Soviet Writers’ Congress in the 1930s which
21
ruled which works were revolutionary, and thus good, or bourgeois,

counter-revolutionary, and thus bad.
Each step Hirsch takes to make literary knowledge the same as
scientific knowledge looks fragile: the choice of authorial intention is, by
his own admission, arbitrary; the idea of atomised ‘subunits of meaning’
taken in isolation doesn’t make sense for literature; and the centrepiece,
‘validation’, turns out to rest on guesses and, he admits, doesn’t really
work unless supplemented by a court. This last-gasp invocation of a legal
process reveals the deep incoherence in his project. He wants to establish
literary meaning as certainly as scientific fact. But judges in court do not
decide the value of π nor the result of a chemical reaction. In law a
verdict – and in literary criticism, a critical judgement – is the result of
persuasion and discussion. The very idea of the ‘literary court’ means his
desire to make interpretation a science has failed and he is left with only
the exercise of authority to confirm ‘the meaning of the text’, just as
Young’s curriculum theorist was a kind of overlord who decided on
controversies within disciplines. Citizens recognise legal authority but
who recognises a ‘literary legal authority’? (As in the old joke, you do not
need to apply for a poetic licence.)
This scientism of Hirsch’s early career, this misapplication of a version
of scientific knowledge to literary understanding, might have ended up
an obscure footnote in literary critical history. Instead, Hirsch, as the
inventor and advocate of ‘cultural literacy’,
Hirsch, as the inventor took the same core idea, flawed as it was,
and advocate of ‘cultural and projected it onto a world stage. It is striking
to think that Hirsch’s ideas, so influential on UK
literacy’, took the same education policy in 2021, have their origin in his
core idea, flawed as it thoughts about the state of the discipline of English
was, and projected it in the decade before John F. Kennedy was elected.
‘Cultural literacy’ has three aspects: its explicitly
onto a world stage political aim; the kind of knowledge it
presupposes; and, following from that, the
methods of delivery it encourages.
The political aim of ‘cultural literacy’ has attracted by far the most
attention from both supporters and opponents. You’ll recall that in the
late 1950s, Hirsch was concerned that there were too many different
literary interpretations and too much diversity in the state of literary
studies: ‘validation’ would offer a secure, stable body of knowledge, in
imitation of scientific knowledge, to reduce this diversity. Similarly, but
on a national scale, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hirsch believed the
increasingly diverse United States needed to ‘restore the balance
between… unity and diversity’ (Hirsch 1983, p.161). ‘Cultural literacy’
22
would help in this task as ‘commonly shared knowledge’ would act as a

‘civil religion’ (Hirsch 1988, p.102) to bind the state together and reduce
diversity. Generally, conservatives have strongly supported and
progressives have attacked this explicitly political idea. But this political
aspect is not the focus of this pamphlet: people of good will can, in good
faith, arrive at different points of view on the role of education in relation
to the nation and diversity.
My focus is on the model of knowledge that ‘cultural literacy’
presupposes and how this, rather than its politics, shapes how it is
delivered. That is why I have spent time outlining the details of the
‘validation’ process from Hirsch’s early career, because it is this same
model of knowledge, scaled up from the level of English as a subject to the
level of ‘national literacy’, that has caused the trouble with the plumbing
under the floorboards.
The origin of ‘cultural literacy’ has taken on a totemic significance and
also reveals the scientism at its core. In 1978, Hirsch and a team of
cognitive scientists ran an experiment designed to test the effectiveness of
good prose. Speed of reading was chosen as the measure of this
effectiveness. They discovered that ‘good style did make an appreciable
difference’ (Hirsch 1983, p.163), but only when the students were familiar
with the topics of the essays they read for the experiment. Disadvantaged
readers, when faced with a text about the Civil War generals Grant and
Lee, ‘would have to get clues from later parts of the text, and then go back
to re-read earlier parts’ (p.163) and so read more slowly. Hirsch
concluded that to read faster (note: not better), students need to know
more words.
But the words they needed to know were not ‘basic vocabulary’ (p.47):
the students had ground-level literacy. Rather, Hirsch argued, they lacked
the ‘background information about Grant, Lee and the Civil War’ (p.47),
crucial words which ‘represent large underlying domains of content’
(p.164). The disadvantaged students needed a ‘national vocabulary’. Note
the amalgamation made here: the students could read, were literate, but
they could not understand the larger cultural context. Hirsch is fusing a
sense that there should be shared background information, challenged by

increasing diversity, with the ability to read: the ‘national decline in our
literacy’ (p.159) that he notes applies to both the phenomena of
disadvantage and diversity. Being disadvantaged and being ‘diverse’ (that
is, not knowing who Grant and Lee were) are made equivalent. Because
of his scientism and because this is couched in the language of basic
literacy – learning to read one word, one unit of meaning at a time – the
solution looks as if it is the same. Two issues – learning basic reading
skills, learning to be an American – have been made one. Indeed, the
23
phrase ‘national vocabulary’ sums up the synthesis of concepts that has

made ‘cultural literacy’ so influential: the support of the disadvantaged;
the idea of shared national knowledge; and the taken-for-granted idea
that a national vocabulary makes up concrete, certain knowledge. And
while Hirsch writes that this national vocabulary, or curriculum, should
‘be taught not just as a series of terms or list of words’ (Hirsch 1988,
p.127), his own work explicitly undermines this by, for example, the 60 or
so pages of words, phrases and dates that conclude Cultural Literacy.
We can see the scientism of the core ideas shared by both ‘cultural
literacy’ and ‘validation’: an atomistic, ‘one word at a time’ model of
interpretation; the idea of a single meaning made certain, ‘valid’ or
‘invalid’; and these ‘correct’ answers, set out, as if by a lawmaker, in an
authoritative list. Next, we’ll look at the consequences.
24
5. Practical
consequences in the
classroom
T
his pamphlet is a work of philosophical plumbing, so I’m going
to show how this deep, under-the-floorboards philosophical
mistake has everyday, water-all-over-the-kitchen-floor
consequences. ‘Powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ offer two
forms of scientism. The first takes scientific knowledge as the model for
all knowledge and then misapplies it to the study of literature; the second
wishes to reimagine literary and cultural knowledge as if it were scientific
knowledge. Their practical, in-the-classroom impacts distort how we
teach literature. I’ll focus on the consequences of the rejection of
hermeneutic circularity and on the presumption that there can be ‘right
or wrong’ answers in the study of literature.
First, Hirsch rejects hermeneutic circularity and argues that a text is
understood by being broken down into isolated, atomised subunits. But
this is just not how literary meaning is developed. Simply put, we do not
focus on one phrase (‘to be or not to be’) and work out what it means,
then move on to the next (‘that is the question’). In reading, each moment
is understood in the context of the larger whole, and the larger whole is
understood through each moment. This shuttling back and forth is the
hermeneutic circularity I discussed earlier.
Denying the role of hermeneutic circularity in understanding literary
texts, seeing them as simply atoms added together, leads to distortions.
One is ‘feature spotting’ or ‘labelling’, drilling students to spot literary or
poetic features. Richard Long argues that for pupils knowing these
features is of little ‘real use when attempting to explain what the text is
about’ (Long 2017). Worse, classroom talk becomes ‘stunted’ and lacks
25
‘any dialogic quality’: the students he observed ‘were simply making a

series of identifications about certain elements of the poem without
actually ‘getting it’ (a phrase they frequently use)’ (ibid.). Long continues:
Students suddenly found it easier to make a more thoughtful and

meaningful comment by identifying how the poem made them
feel. ‘I like how the poem just starts off with ‘Suddenly he
awoke’…’ began one of the boys in the discussion. ‘… it gives it a
sense of realisation… he wakes up and he has to start running for
his life’. (Long 2017)
Acquiring a list of terms for features looks as if it is knowledge (as, say,

learning the names of plants might be in biology), but it is not the kind of
knowledge that is core to the study of literature.
Another, similar distortion of the study of literature, stemming from
the rejection of hermeneutic circularity, is the ‘vocabulary gap’. This
suggests that students need to know the meaning of each word before
even daring to read a poem. Some of the psychology underlying claims
about this ‘gap’ is disputed (Bleiman 2020, pp.79-93). And one of the
points of literature (unless you believe, like Hirsch, in the right
interpretation) is that the multiple meanings of words are important. But
more, you do not just use vocabulary: you use sentences, types of speech,
literary style, form, genre, narrative and context and so on.
(Commentators often confuse the way we come to understand literary
meaning with discussions of second language acquisition or with learning
to master forms of scientific knowledge, as if all learning was the same,
like downloading information: for an example of both these confusions,
see Christodoulou 2013, pp.63-70, especially footnote 17.)
Second, the scientism at the heart of this
the scientism at the model of knowledge makes us think there must
heart of this model of be right-or-wrong answers. For Hirsch, once we
have decided that ‘Shakespeare did not mean that
knowledge makes us Hamlet wished to sleep with his mother’, then an
think there must be
interpretation which makes this claim ‘is invalid.

right-or-wrong answers It does not correspond to the author’s meaning…
It is irrelevant that the play permits such an
interpretation’ (Hirsch 1967, p.123). In contrast, I want to persuade you
that, while there may be wrong answers in science, this is rarely so in the
study of literature, as the National Curriculum implies. An interpretation
might be more or less skilful or interesting or persuasive, but a
sophisticated appreciation of the ‘depth and power’ of a literary work, an
26
‘informed personal response’ cannot be invalid, especially if there is

evidence to support it.
This idea of right-or-wrong answers in literary study (originating in
Hirsch’s ‘court of validation’) has led to numerous distortions. One is the
overreliance on teaching literary terms. Isobel Woodger, an OCR English
Subject Advisor, writes that, the danger of a focus on subject terminology
is that ‘in doing the work of remembering the term, candidates can forget
the meat of the task: interpretation’ (Woodger 2019). Candidates can be
left ‘feeling that they have done enough when they have identified a
feature rather than using such identification as a springboard for
explaining the impact’ (ibid.).
But perhaps the most damaging impact of this incorrectly applied
model of right-or-wrong answers is in the simplistic misapplication of
context. Context, in the form of reductively understood historical facts, is
an easy ‘go to’ for right answers. One example is the ‘knowledge-rich’ Ark
Mastery Curriculum for English Literature, which seems not to be
interested in literature but in simplified versions of history as context.
The key knowledge in the curriculum map for Oliver Twist is, first, ‘life in
Victorian London; Victorian crime’, and only then, ‘the form of the novel’
(Ark Curriculum Plus 2020). Worse, nowhere in the map over Years 7, 8
and 9 is there a discussion of character, plot, narrative voice, how a novel
works or even what a novel is. This is not teaching the student how to
read novels but offering an ersatz Victorian social history. Similarly, for A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, the key knowledge is ‘Life in Elizabethan
England; life in ancient Athens; Shakespeare’s life; the four lovers; the love
potion; Elizabethan family relationships’, and then only finally, ‘the form
of a play’ (ibid.). The historical context is prioritised over how a play
works or what a comedy is. It implies I have to know the history before a
play moves me or before I can understand it. Versions of second-hand
history make easy-to-assess subunits of ‘valid’ knowledge, but they do not
lead to a deeper understanding. By contrast, literary knowledge – ideas
about genre or character, say – are the subject of critical debate. There is
no simple definition or subunit-sized answer to what character is or what
‘realism’ does, so ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ shy away

from these complexities and seek what can be easily pinned down. Recall
Young’s textual irritation with the endless debates of the humanities and
Hirsch’s desire to finish debate over interpretations of Hamlet: both
emerge from their scientistic understanding of knowledge and run
counter to the nature of the subject. Second-hand facts are easy to assess,
right-or-wrong, but this leads to what Amanda Spielman called the
‘tendency to mistake badges and stickers for learning itself’ (Spielman
2017).
27
Indeed, both ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’, with their

assumed right-or-wrong answers, have aggravated the focus on
assessment, which runs counter to OFSTED’s recent public statements on
teaching the curriculum, not the test. The Ark Mastery Curriculum
insists that the study of each text is driven by one question: all the
students’ work on Oliver Twist is assessed by asking ‘what kind of
character is Bill Sykes?’. This tends towards the kind of valid/invalid
reading suggested by ‘cultural literacy’. But it also seems incoherent in
terms of the curriculum’s own setup. The students have learned
factoids about Victorian life in London
The students have but nothing about the representation of character
learned factoids about in fiction, how plots work, or about values:
Victorian life in London how can they judge what kind of character –
literary or moral – Bill Sykes is?
but nothing about the A further consequence of this scientistic approach
representation of and the concern over assessment has been
the growth of a bad version of direct instruction or
character in fiction, how drill in English (Davis 2017; Davis 2018; Aldridge
plots work, or about 2018). Many advocates for drill turn to a scholarly
values article by Paul Kirschner and colleagues called
‘Why minimal guidance during instruction does
not work’ (Kirschner et al. 2006). Focused on education in science, not
the humanities, it argues that doing experiments to discover scientific
laws is not as effective as simply being told those laws. The key
experimental data comes from medical students: the best-known study
shows that medical students trained using problem-based learning (PBL)
had lower exam marks and more study hours, although this had no
knock-on effect on their careers and these students displayed better
scores for clinical performance. (Roughly, then, they were judged slightly
less good at ‘facts’ but slightly better at actually being doctors, which
requires more than simply factual knowledge.) PBL-trained doctors did,
however, order more tests and so were more costly (p.82) and more
time-consuming and expensive to teach (p.83). Kirschner concludes that
there is a ‘clear distinction between learning a discipline and practicing a

discipline’ (p.78). These kinds of precise findings (here, from medical
students) are regularly expanded by commentators to support drill across
all fields and levels of education. In the study of literature, this is
ludicrous. It suggests that students can simply be told what a poem means
without reading or experiencing it for themselves. But this reveals the
core difference in forms of knowledge: in the natural sciences, the
experiment is correct if all the students reach the same result; in the study
28
of literature, the lesson has gone well if all the students come up with
different, informed interpretations.
The desire for right-or-wrong answers strikes at something at the core
of the study of English literature, and embedded, too, in the National
Curriculum: student response. As I have suggested, student response is
both knowledge itself, and the starting point for other forms of
knowledge. And, after all, ‘student response’ is only a pedagogic way of
talking about something central to literature: the creativity that lies in
reading. Advocates of ‘cultural literacy’ and ‘powerful knowledge’
amalgamate two different senses of literacy: learning how to read is one
thing; learning how to read or interpret literature quite another. The essays
in Brian Cox’s edited collection Literacy is Not Enough (Cox 1998)
repeatedly demonstrate how basic literacy and engaging with literature
are different. Richard Hoggart, for example, distinguishes between basic
literacy and ‘creative reading’, the reading of literature to which the reader
brings their ‘own responsiveness to language, to tone, to argument, to the
stresses of the author’s efforts’ (Cox 1998, p.63). More, the fusion of these
two senses of literacy imports easily assessed right-or-wrong answers into
the study of literature and so actually disempowers learners. It implies
that novice leaners cannot say much of worth and devalues their own
response and experience. As we saw in the case of Young, this is a recipe
for the worst kind of assessment-itis: it divorces what a student
experiences in engaging with literature from what they are told to think.
By contrast, in the study of literature, a firm distinction between the
novice and the expert does not exist. This is why there is a widely held
belief that, as Martha Nussbaum argues, a work of literature ‘is equally
available to all readers’ (Nussbaum 1986, p.14), that any creative reader
can say something important about a text. There are better and worse
readings, more or less convincing ones, but this underlying subjectivity is
part of the subject, because we humans are the subject of the humanities.
This subjectivity is ‘a feature not a bug’, as they say, precisely because the
study of literature helps each of us discover our own distinctiveness.
29
6. Subject-centred
education and
disciplinary thinking
I
n my account of the mistake under the floorboards, I’ve described
in detail how both ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘critical literacy’ have
scientism at their core. I’ve shown that this has all sorts of practical
impacts on our children’s study of literature. I want to sketch here, now,
another way: a subject-centred education which stems from and develops
what I call disciplinary thinking. And I want to demonstrate this with a
practical example, a teaching project for Year 9 students run by the
English and Media Centre, an educational charity which supports the
teaching of English.
Education gurus argue that subjects should be taught: I agree. But to
do this properly means teaching a subject, a discipline, ‘right the way
down’, down to its very conception of itself and its ideas of knowledge. It
is this deep idea of a discipline that has been missing in contemporary
pedagogy and to which we need to return.
To do that we need to have a sense of what disciplines are.
Historically, the origin of academic disciplines as we understand them
is tied up with the period we call the Enlightenment. As in our current
age, the Enlightenment was characterised by a huge blossoming of

knowledge. ‘Too many books’ (Wellmon 2015, p.151) led to a crisis:
which knowledge was authoritative, valuable and legitimate? What,
actually, is knowledge? One response to this crisis were the many
encyclopaedia projects, each an attempt to encompass everything in an
‘empire of erudition’. These failed because it became clear that any
organising principle was arbitrary and abstract (‘Why… organise an
encyclopaedia alphabetically?’ (p.90): after all, what has an aardvark to do
30
with argon?) and because they simply added up ‘inert’ knowledge. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, academic disciplines began to
develop as a response to this problem. Disciplines became ‘living
encyclopaedias’, not simply a list of facts but ‘a relationship of concepts’
(p.249), which were crafted, shared and cultivated over time, sifting and
thinking through knowledge.
This had three consequences. Disciplines form the people who work
within and for them: we recognise this in everyday language when we
speak of our colleagues as mathematicians, geographers and so on.
Disciplines are also ever-evolving traditions, which are built around
working out what they should and shouldn’t contain, how they are or are
not relevant, and how their processes work. As a result of these two,
disciplines also develop what Lee Shulman calls signature pedagogies,
ways of teaching that embody both the practitioner and the developing
tradition of the discipline (Shulman 2005).
This historical account of the origins of disciplines has a counterpart
in cognitive psychology, which argues for the importance of disciplines in
the present. Howard Gardner’s research explores the ‘frames’ of our
minds. For him, a discipline ‘constitutes a distinctive way of thinking
about the world’ (Gardner 2007, p.16). Facts, figures, formulae – subject
matter – are ‘inert knowledge’ (p.16), made alive by being placed into a
frame, a discipline. All ‘educational efforts are dedicated toward the
acquisition of the appropriate disciplinary knowledge, habits of minds,
and patterns of behaviour’ (p.15). These disciplines shape our general
understanding of the world, which, Gardner writes, emerge from
‘centuries of sophisticated understandings on the part of the scholarly
community’ (p.14). They also shape our day-to-day life, as we rely on
people shaped by disciplinary knowledge: doctors, nurses, lawyers,
journalists. Knowledges framed in a discipline are deeper and more
flexible because they have been ‘acquired in a meaningful context’ (p.18)
and are not simply adding up a list of facts. This is ‘deep understanding’,
the formation of habits of mind. ‘Deep understanding’ means that an
individual can take an idea and ‘apply it appropriately in a new situation’
(Gardner 1999, p.119). In the case of English, that means being able to
read poem you have not seen before, or analyse a novel or TV series that
is new to you. Remembering information is not the same as engaging
with a topic because you may recall information but may not have a clue
how to use it: without disciplinary thinking, Gardner writes, ‘cultural
literacy lacks an epistemological home; it amounts to a hodgepodge of
concepts and facts’, and without ‘disciplinary texture and glue, the facts
are likely to be soon forgotten’ (p.118).
31
These parallel tracks – the historical and the psychological – tell us

about the deep ideas of a discipline: disciplines form people and their
habits of mind, giving them a meaningful
disciplines form people framework to understand and develop new
and their habits of mind, knowledge as well as to grasp what is established.
Disciplines are not collections of ‘inert
giving them a facts’ but continuing conversations which change
meaningful framework to over time: each has its own complex and profound
understand and develop tradition of thought from which it has arisen,
its own specialised way of teaching or signature
new knowledge pedagogy. A deep understanding, a ‘disciplinary
consciousness’, comes from grasping the concepts
which arise in that field. This deep idea of the discipline is vital in its
teaching. John Hattie writes that a crucial factor for improving the quality
of student outcomes is not ‘the amount of knowledge’ a teacher has but
‘how teachers see the surface and the deeper understandings of the
subjects that they teach’ (Hattie 2012, p.28). Expert teachers, he says,
organise and use their content knowledge differently: that is, they
understand the deep ideas of their subject.
These ideas of deep understanding, disciplinary thinking and
signature pedagogies might seem a long way from the classroom.
However, they are clearly and practically demonstrated in a project run
by the English and Media Centre (EMC) in the autumn term of 2018
(EMC 2019). There’s not space here for a full account (the report is freely
available online) and I’m just going to connect the dots, as it were, from
the project to my argument.
The EMC were involved in redesigning a scheme of work for Year 9
students on Fabio Geda’s In the Sea There are Crocodiles. The school
wanted more group work and dialogic learning but the redesign grew into
‘something much more all-encompassing’ (EMC 2019, p.1). The previous
scheme of work focused on the GCSE requirements, provided a great deal
of contextual knowledge and scaffolded the responses of the students in
the form of PEETAL paragraphs (Point, Evidence, Explanation,
Technique, Analysis, Link). The EMC project changed this significantly.

Before teaching, the teachers discussed with each other the core of the
book, its genre, its structure, symbolism and themes. But more
importantly, the students and the teachers shared the development of an
‘agenda’ (p.3), a focus on what was most ‘interesting and significant’
about the novel. This was not ‘presented’ to the class by the teacher but
came out of the classwork as a kind of shared thinking and continued to
be adapted during teaching. Students were encouraged to add their own
items and think for themselves about what was important in the text. The
lessons were flexible, ‘a responsive framework, not a rigid schedule’ (p.3).
32
There was well regulated group work (‘ten or fifteen minutes with a
requirement to choose something, decide something, agree something,
argue through something’ (p.3)). And while the assessment would mirror
the GCSE, the teachers did not emphasise this nor specifically prepare the
students for the assessment. As a consequence, the student writing was
based on open questions (‘What, in this extract, is characteristic of the
book as a whole?’) not more typical narrow ones (‘Write a PEETAL
paragraph about a sentence from the text’) (p.3).
The project was much more of a success than anticipated. The
students were more engaged and responded at a higher conceptual level;
they continued being interested after class; the teachers were clearer
about their focus; behaviour, about which some teachers had worried,
was better. The emphasis on talk led to improved writing: students wrote
more and wrote better. Rather than follow the ‘powerful knowledge’
forms – short notes, charts, annotations and exploded quotations – the
students demonstrated more developed writing on larger concepts:
narrative, their own responses, themes and structure, and the author’s
choices. The creative/critical writing (‘writing an extra chapter, or an
episode from their own lives, in the style of the novel’ (p.3)) was especially
successful and allowed the students to ‘think deeper into how and why
writers make certain decisions’ (p.6). All this built student confidence and
ability. Interestingly, this approach also addressed a key issue in English: it
led to an increase in boys’ engagement and achievement.
This successful project demonstrates in action many of the things I
have been discussing. The teaching of literature here was a dialogue (or
joint venture) which did not assume a stark division between novice and
expert and so drew on the experience of students. The students, with the
teachers, co-produced the agendas and so developed and discussed their
own different responses, experiences, judgements and values. In talking
with the teacher and in their groups, the students came to persuade
(‘argue through’ rather than ‘calculate’), which also developed their
confidence. Rather than adding up atomised facts, the students moved
from the text to big picture concepts and then back to the text:
hermeneutic circularity in practice. The focus was on literary and

disciplinary concepts (like narrative, structure) rather than inert and
atomised historical facts, which meant the students were able to apply
these ideas to new parts of the text, and to other works, as their learning
developed. The teachers turned to longstanding signature pedagogies of
the subject like creative/critical writing and group work, rather than the
more scientistic charts, annotations and PEETAL paragraphs. The focus
was not on assessment but on developing habits of mind, helping the
students think like literary critics, which led to good results. This is what
happens when the plumbing works.
33
7. Some policy
suggestions
I
n making some broad policy suggestions, I want to stress
that the model of the study of literature I have been advocating
is the one laid out in the National Curriculum. This – and not some
progressive ideal – is what ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’
have been distorting. Further, the mission-creep of scientism cuts across
the political spectrum: the arguments underlying this pamphlet apply to
both traditional and progressive education.
• We need to rebalance our national conversation about teaching:
from the language of ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’
to the significance of disciplines, their deep understandings of
their field and their own disciplinary consciousness. This is not to
dismiss the insights of Hirsch and Young, nor to argue for a return
to skills. Rather, it is to temper their ideas through the realisation
that disciplines are profoundly different from each other.
Disciplines teach habits of mind or dispositions. A student of
maths is a mathematician, of history a historian. Students of
English literature are taught to think like literary critics. Without
paying serious attention to these deep understandings, which go
all the way down to philosophical concepts about knowledge, we
do not serve our students or those subjects well.

• In matters of curriculum and pedagogy, headteachers and senior
management teams might listen a little less to, for example, the
overlord curriculum theorist and a little more to their professional
and hard-working teachers, formed in their disciplines. Our
curricula need to reflect the disciplines they teach. The English
and Media Centre’s project for Year 9 students on Fabio Geda’s In
the Sea There are Crocodiles models this very well.
34
• Initial teacher education (ITE) and continuing professional

development (CPD) should reflect the fact that knowing a
discipline is not simply knowing its content, but involves
understanding the wider concepts that frame the discipline itself.
• Stakeholders involved in the study of literature (teachers, schools,
national and regional organisations, universities, educational and
literary charities and others) should work together to clarify the
evolving shape of the discipline. This would bring into focus the
kind of knowledge offered through the study of literature and help
to develop and promote its signature pedagogies.
• Finally, a lesson of this pamphlet is that we should be a little
cautious about the generation of educational gurus that has
sprung up in the UK with the decline in university teacher
education departments. Many of these gurus have vital things to
tell us and should be welcomed. However, many also rely on
homogenising knowledge and disregarding the differences
between disciplines so as to maximise their markets and impact.
35
8. Conclusion
T
The sciences study nature; the humanities, and the
study of literature especially, are concerned with the time-bound,
changing existence in which we ourselves are participants. The
study of literature is a form of communication and making of meaning
and value. Reading literature involves experience, judgement, pleasure
and emotion. We learn to write by turning not to equations but to other
people’s attempts, models and forms of experience; we learn what we
think not by computing but by discussing, with others and with
ourselves. This does not mean there are no basic ideas or core concepts in
the study of literature. There are: they include the concept of genres and
their impact on meaning; features like narrative voice, plot, arc, structure,
closure; a sense of how form and style work, and more. There’s a craft to
reading a poem that can be taught, a proficiency to thinking through a
novel in relation to your own experience that you can learn. But crucially,
unlike the sciences, all these terms are not equations or simple facts: each
term I’ve listed is part of a continual conversation through which the
discipline evolves. The terms mark questions in a conversation, not
answers to an algorithm. It’s by encountering and, more importantly,
joining this conversation, not by memorising a list of inert knowledge,
that students will learn to read and succeed in literary studies and, even
better, to love literature.
36
References
Aldridge, D. (2018) ‘Cheating education and the insertion of knowledge’,

Educational Theory 68 (6), pp.609-624.
Angelou, M. (1985) ‘The role of art in life’, keynote address at the seventh
annual convention of the National Association of Local Arts Agencies,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. https://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/
files/MAngelou_1985_2.pdf
Aristotle (2014) Aristotle’s Ethics, trans. J. Barnes and A. Kenny, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.
Ark Curriculum Plus (2020) English Mastery Curriculum Map.

https://www.englishmastery.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/
Curriculum-Map-2019-20.pdf
Ashman, G. (2019) ‘Academics don’t care for your knowledge-rich

curriculum’, Filling the Pail blog https://gregashman.wordpress.com/
2019/05/03/academics-dont-care-for-your-knowledge-rich-curriculum/
Belas, O. (2019) ‘Knowledge, the curriculum, and democratic education:

the curious case of school English’, Research in Education 103 (1), pp.49–
67.
Bleiman, B. (2020) What Matters in English Teaching, London: English

and Media Centre.
Cain, W. (1977) ‘Authority, ‘cognitive atheism’, and the aims of interpreta-

tion: the literary theory of E.D. Hirsch’, College English 39 (3), pp.333-345.
Christodoulou, D. (2013) Seven Myths about Education, London: Rout-

ledge.
37
Cox, B. (1998) Literacy is Not Enough: Essays on the Importance of Reading,

Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Davis, A. (2018) ‘Evidence-based approaches to education: direct instruc-

tion, anyone?’, Management in Education 32 (3), pp.135–138.
Davis, A. (2017) ‘It worked there. Will it work here? Researching teaching
methods’, Ethics and Education 12 (3), pp.289-303.
Department for Education (DfE) (2013) National Curriculum for English:

programmes of study: key stage 4, London: DfE. https://assets.publishing.
service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/331877/KS4_English_PoS_FINAL_170714.pdf
English and Media Centre (EMC) (2019) It’s Good to Talk

– Working on a Novel at KS3, London: EMC. https://www.
englishandmedia.co.uk/cpd-and-consultancy/our-projects/
emc-its-good-to-talk-working-on-a-novel-at-ks3/
Freire, P. (2000) [1968]Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Continuum.
Gibb, N. (2015) ‘How E.D. Hirsch came to shape UK government policy’,

in J. Simons and N. Porter (eds) Knowledge and the Curriculum: A
Collection of Essays to Accompany E.D. Hirsch’s Lecture at Policy Exchange,
London: Policy Exchange. https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/
uploads/2016/09/knowledge-and-the-curriculum.pdf
Gardner, H. (2003) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,

New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (1999) The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should

Understand, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Gardner, H. (2007) Five Minds for the Future, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Business Press
Gascoigne, N. and Thornton, T. (2013) Tacit Knowledge, Routledge:

London.
Giovanelli, M. and Mason, J. (2015) ‘‘Well I don’t feel that’: schemas,

worlds and authentic reading in the classroom’, English in Education 49
(1), pp.41-55.
38
Hattie, J. (2012) Visible Learning for Teachers, London: Routledge.
Hirsch, E.D. (1984) ‘Meaning and significance reinterpreted’, Critical

Inquiry 11 (2), pp.202-225.
Hirsch E.D. (1983) ‘Cultural literacy’, The American Scholar 52 (2),

pp.159-169.
Hirsch, E.D. (1967) Validity in Interpretation, New Haven: Yale.
Hirsch, E.D. (1960) ‘Objective interpretation’, PMLA 75 (4), pp.463-479.
Hirst, P.H. (1974) Knowledge and the Curriculum, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Jamshidi, K. (2016) ‘You’re an English student who doesn’t

read?’, studyingfiction blog. https://studyingfiction.com/2016/12/15/
youre-an-english-student-who-doesnt-read-by-egh324-student-kathry
n-jamshidi/
Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J. and Clark, R.E. (2006) ‘Why minimal guidance
during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of construc-
tivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching’,
Educational Psychologist 41 (2), pp.75–86.
Long, R. (2017) ‘The problem with ‘subject terminology’ and the power of
‘I like’’, English and Media Centre blog.https://www.englishandmedia.co.
uk/blog/the-problem-with-subject-terminology-and-the-power-of-i-like
Midgley, M. (1996) Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, London: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek

Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ofsted (2019) Education Inspection Framework. https://assets.publishing.

service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/801429/Education_inspection_framework.pdf
Ryle, G. (1990) [1949]The Concept of Mind, London: Penguin.
Shulman, L.S. (2005) ‘Signature pedagogies in the professions’, Daedalus

134 (3), pp.52-59.
39
Snow, C.P. (1993) [1959]The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Spielman, A. (2017) ‘AmandaSpielman’s speech at the Festival of Ed-

ucation’, 23 June 2017. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/
amanda-spielmans-speech-at-the-festival-of-education
Wellmon, C. (2015) Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and

the Invention of the Modern Research University, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Willingham, D. (2009) Why Don’t Students Like School?, San Francisco:

Jossey-Bass.
Willingham, D. (2018), ‘A brief appreciation of E.D. Hirsch’. http://www.

danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog/
a-brief-appreciation-of-e-d-hirsch
Wimsatt, W.K. Jr. and Beardsley, M.C. (1946) ‘The intentional fallacy’, The
Sewanee Review 54 (3), pp.468-488.
Winch, P. (1991) The Idea of a Social Science, and Its Relation to Philosophy,
London: Routledge.
Woodger, I. (2019) ‘English ‘subject terminology’ – precision or

complication? How might it help rather than hinder?’ OCR blog,
6 November 2019. https://www.ocr.org.uk/blog/english-subject%
20terminology-precision-or-complication-how-might-it-help-rather-th
an-hinder/
Young, M. and Lambert, D. (2014) Knowledge and the Future School:

Curriculum and Social Justice, London: Bloomsbury.
Young, M. and Muller, J. (2016) Curriculum and the Specialisation of

Knowledge: Studies in the Sociology of Education, London: Routledge.
40
About the author
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought

at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary
literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy, and Holocaust
and Genocide Studies. He is the author of seven books, including Doing
English (2017) and Literature: Why It Matters (2019), and the editor or
co-editor of ten more, including English: Shared Futures (2018). His work
has been translated into seven languages. He has advised the UK
government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and
all the English and Welsh exam boards.
41

Impact - 2021 - Eaglestone - Powerful Knowledge Cultural Literacy and The Study of Literature in Schools

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Impact - 2021 - Eaglestone - Powerful Knowledge Cultural Literacy and The Study of Literature in Schools

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

‘Powerful knowledge’, ‘cultural literacy’ and the study of

How to regulate faith schools

Matthew Clayton, Andrew Mason, Adam Swift, Ruth Wareham

IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 1 15/05/21 4:23 PM

IMPACT 20: To Read or Not To Read? Decoding synthetic phonics,

IMPACT 9: School Inspection in England: a re-appraisal, Colin Richards,

IMPACT 8: Teaching Thinking Skills, Stephen Johnson, September 2001

IMPACT 7: Sex Education, David Archard, September 2000

IMPACT 5: Why Teach Foreign Languages in Schools? A philosophical response

IMPACT 2: Performance, Pay and Professionals: measuring the quality of teaching:

IMPACT 1: Educational Assessment: a critique of current policy, Andrew Davis,

IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 2 15/05/21 4:23 PM

IMPACT 20: To Read or Not To Read? Decoding synthetic phonics,

IMPACT 9: School Inspection in England: a re-appraisal, Colin Richards,

IMPACT 8: Teaching Thinking Skills, Stephen Johnson, September 2001

IMPACT 7: Sex Education, David Archard, September 2000

IMPACT 5: Why Teach Foreign Languages in Schools? A philosophical response

IMPACT 2: Performance, Pay and Professionals: measuring the quality of teaching:

IMPACT 1: Educational Assessment: a critique of current policy, Andrew Davis,

IMP_2020_26_cover.indd 2 15/05/21 4:23 PM

1. Introduction: the mistake under the floorboards 7

locations in the programmes of study for History and Geography, and a

Society of Great Britain.

modern foreign languages, John Gingell’s on the visual arts, Philip

© 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

• The teaching of English literature in the UK today is being

• This misapplication is clear in the case of Michael Young’s

it were scientific knowledge. I analyse this deep structure in his

So, what is the problem? Something is rotten in the state of English.

reforming the curriculum in ‘Hirschian terms’ (p.13). For Gibb, Hirsch

accurately, how to play an instrument, how to write a formal letter or an

Phronesis is about knowing how to work as a team, how to perform with

way around: how to write ‘accurately, fluently,

Conversations in pedagogy have become about information and its

© 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

teacher: teachers know more than the facts of their disciplines.)

This is absolutely clear from how Young describes ‘powerful

brings to school and the curriculum:

conceptual knowledge pupils’ relationships with the ‘concept’ of a

All these characteristics – true, real, value-free, revisable, specialised,

clearly, I’m going to use a technique from English – ‘creative/critical

pupils’ relationships with the ‘concept’ of the play Hamlet should

This division between literature as experience and literature as

senior management teams, try to teach English as if it were chemistry.

he believes that the ‘much-advertised cleavage between thinking in the

lead the critic to discover a single unambiguous meaning, the meaning of

abstract (as a computer might): we come

big picture. Hirsch explicitly rejects hermeneutic circularity, arguing that

‘uncritical or fractious souls might stubbornly refuse to assent to

ruled which works were revolutionary, and thus good, or bourgeois,

would help in this task as ‘commonly shared knowledge’ would act as a

sense that there should be shared background information, challenged by

phrase ‘national vocabulary’ sums up the synthesis of concepts that has

© 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

‘any dialogic quality’: the students he observed ‘were simply making a

Students suddenly found it easier to make a more thoughtful and

Acquiring a list of terms for features looks as if it is knowledge (as, say,

interpretation which makes this claim ‘is invalid.

‘informed personal response’ cannot be invalid, especially if there is

‘realism’ does, so ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’ shy away

Indeed, both ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural literacy’, with their