[HirschPublications 1] Hirsch is best known for his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which was a national best-seller and a catalyst for the standards movement in American education.

In this book Hirsch took issue with "systematic" critics of Blake's work, including Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom.

In a review of important works on interpretation, Sherri Irvin gives the following summary of Validity in Interpretation: The seminal statement of actual intentionalism: Hirsch holds that ‘meaning is an affair of consciousness and not of physical signs or things’ (23), though he allows that linguistic convention constrains the meanings the author can intend for a particular utterance.

He argues that the author's intention is necessary to fix meaning, since the application of conventions alone would typically leave a text wildly indeterminate.

The students at the community college did not know who Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee were and, as a result, they struggled to make sense of a passage on the U.S. Civil War.

[13][HirschPublications 8] Hirsch was dismayed that community college students, raised in Virginia, where much of the Civil War was fought, had not heard of Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate States Army or Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union Army, or the roles these men played in the American Civil War.

His main objective, as he has frequently noted, was to help disadvantaged students to cultural literacy and improved reading comprehension.

This would become the appendix of his 1987 book, an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts,"[3] representing the "necessary minimum of American general knowledge".

[13] In 1986, Hirsch established the non-profit Cultural Literacy Foundation, with a goal of developing a fact-rich core curriculum and piloting it in selected elementary schools.

[15] Against the backdrop of the release of a scathing report on education in the United States—A Nation at Risk—Ravitch encouraged Hirsch to publish Cultural Literacy as a non-fiction book in 1987.

[HirschPublications 10] The book included an unannotated list of approximately "5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts" every American should know in order to be culturally literate.

[3][4][Notes 1][16] By 1988, Hirsch was featured in the New York Times, as a "self-proclaimed crusade against noneducation" in his role as president of the Cultural Literacy Foundation which was headquartered in Charlottesville.

[17][16] In his 1996 book The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, Hirsch was highly critical of the American education system, which he described as a "Thoughtworld" hostile to research-based findings and dissenting ideas.

[HirschPublications 11] Throughout his career, Hirsch denounced the influence of 19th century romanticism on American culture in general, and on progressive educational ideas in particular.

[HirschPublications 12] In The Schools We Need Hirsch said that, "Higher-level skills critically depend upon the automatic mastery of repeated lower-level activities.

In 2016, he published "Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing our Children from Failed Educational Theories", outlining the three major problems with education in the United States: the emphasis on teaching skills, such as critical thinking skills, rather than knowledge, individualism rather than communal learning, and developmentalism, that is, teaching children what is "appropriate" for their age.

[HirschPublications 15] In his 2014 article published by Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Robert Pondiscio, the author of How the Other Half Learns in which he reviewed Success Academy, Pondiscio said if the Common Core State Standards Initiative was "properly understood and implemented", it would be a "delivery mechanism" for Hirsch's "ideas and work" and his Core Knowledge curriculum.

[22][16] Pondiscio said that Politico had paired David Coleman—main author of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts—with Hirsch in eight place on their 2014 list of fifty "thinkers, doers and dreamers who really matter.

"[23] Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on education reform, described Hirsch's "curriculum for democracy" in 2009, as "content-rich pedagogy" that makes better citizens and smarter kids.

"[22] Stern said that William Bennett, a prominent conservative who served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later US Secretary of Education, was an early proponent of Hirsch's views.

In The Making of Americans (2010), Hirsch said that, he was a "political liberal" who was "forced to become an educational conservative" after he had "recognized the relative inertness and stability of the shared background knowledge students need to master reading and writing."

He said that the "democratic goal of high universal literacy would require schools to practice a large measure of educational traditionalism".

On the political right, Hirsch has been accused of being "totalitarian, for his idea lends itself to turning over curriculum selection to federal authorities and thereby eliminating the time-honored American tradition of locally controlled schools".

[25] Harvard University professor Howard Gardner, who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, has been a long-time critic of Hirsch.

[32][33] A 2010 article in the U.K.-based TES described Core Knowledge as a "kind of national curriculum" that outlines Hirsch's ideas on what "children should know in English language and literature, history, geography, maths, science, music, and art".

[34] E. D. Hirsch was first invited to Portugal in 2004 by the then minister of education David Justino and then participated at two conferences organized by Nuno Crato.

Later, his ideas were very influential, namely during the tenure of minister Nuno Crato (2011–2015) in which the curricula were reorganized and detailed learning outcomes ("metas curriculares") were introduced.

These learning outcomes explicitly highlight the essential knowledge students should master and were built in a progressive, systematic, and layered fashion inspired by Hirsch's ideas.

Various analysts[35] attribute to these rigorous and demanding standards, among other factors, the notable 2015 improvement in Portuguese student results in PISA[36] and TIMSS[37] international studies.