Colleagues: On March 22, 2013, E. D. “Don” Hirsch, Jr. will celebrate his 85th birthday. I first met Don in 1984 at a meeting to kick-off President Reagan’s adult literacy initiative. At that time Don’s writing’s on Cultural Literacy were attracting much attention because of its emphasis on the role of knowledge in the development of literacy. This focus on knowledge contrasted with the view of literacy as “decoding” or a sort of abstract “skill” independent of any particular knowledge.
My research interactions with Don came after he became aware of a 1974 book colleagues and I wrote called Auding and Reading: A Developmental Model. This was the first adult literacy oriented book to integrate findings from the new fields of information processing and cognitive psychology into a theory of the development of literacy. It introduced ideas such as constructing mental representations of the environment, foreshadowing today's constructivism, the oracy to literacy transfer effect, suggesting that after learning decoding, the oral and written languages draw on the same conceptual base and comprehension processes, and the reading potential concept, in which oral language sets an initial limit for the comprehension of the written language. Though actually an old idea in reading research, in 1996 Don referred to this as “Sticht's Law” in his book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them.
In addition to his research writings Don’s Core Knowledge Foundation has produced many volumes of books for developing knowledge to improve reading comprehension, including a recent curriculum for those beginning to learn to read which draws on the primacy of oral language development.
The field of literacy education has a great friend, educator, researcher, and advocate in the person of Don Hirsch, Jr. I am pleased to send him warm wishes for a very happy 85th birthday!
Tom Sticht