E. D. Hirsch is an American educator, literary critic, and theorist, and professor emeritus of humanities at the University of Virginia. He is best known for Cultural Literacy (1987), which argued that students need a shared stock of names, dates, and concepts. Through the Core Knowledge Foundation, which he founded, he also helped launch the Core Knowledge Series of grade-level books, starting with What Your First Grader Needs to Know in 1991. Earlier, he wrote on literary interpretation, including Validity in Interpretation (1967).
