Addresses the failures and consequences of America's early education system, advocating for a shared knowledge curriculum that provides an educational foundation for all students to strengthen American unity, identity, and democracy.

In Why Knowledge Matters, influential scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr., addresses critical issues in contemporary education reform and shows how cherished truisms about education and child development have led to unintended and negative consequences. Hirsch draws on recent findings in neuroscience and data from France to provide new evidence for the argument that a carefully planned, knowledge-based elementary curriculum is essential to providing the foundations...