ABSTRACT
E D Hirsch had a long and distinguished academic career in English literature, literary interpretation and hermeneutics, teaching at Yale and the University of Virginia, before he turned his attention to education. In 2011 a British version of the Core Knowledge Sequence was made available online by the conservative think-tank Civitas, which has also adapted the supplementary publications for a British audience. Hirsch's association with 'conservatism', however, needs qualification. Personally, he is on record as saying of his own political beliefs that he is of 'the Left', a 'political liberal', a Democrat supporter in his own country, indeed 'practically a socialist'. Hirsch's research into the readability of texts brought him into conflict with orthodox educational opinion about how children should be taught to read. Hirsch also traced to Romanticism the antipathy to assessment among members of what he called the 'professorial army' of 'teachers of pedagogy'.
