The Research · 13 November 2025
Cricket in Australia
You feel like you understand every word, but you have no clue what's going on. About E. D. Hirsch, background knowledge, and why the gap between kids grows after they've learned to read.
E. D. Hirsch in particular writes a lot about this, all the way back from 1977, when he found out that the biggest gap between kids from homes with a lot of cultural capital, and those without, came after the kids had learned to "decode" the letters and form words... He showed that background knowledge matters incredibly much more for reading comprehension than we think — and that there's very little value in practicing reading comprehension specifically...
He gives an example with a text about cricket from Australia, where you feel like you understand every word, but have no clue what's going on... If you read a book and you don't know that France is next to Germany, you don't know when the Middle Ages were, or that a horse has stirrups, or what a jousting tournament is, or what a molecule is (roughly, at least that it's something incredibly small — details can come later) etc etc, then you don't get anything out of the text, even if you can decode the letters and have learned a ton of "reading comprehension strategies"...
Some kids get it from home, and some don't.
Evening out
At the same time, one of the basic ideas of school in Norway is of course to even out differences... I guess the point is that students with more intellectual parents etc get a lot from home, while others don't, and without a systematic focus on this from the school — geography, Bible stories, regular history, etc, the gap gets bigger and bigger...
And if the school doesn't have a targeted strategy for how to give the kids that knowledge, through a well thought out knowledge-based curriculum, and well designed teaching materials, like textbooks, then that gap just gets bigger and bigger. It's not enough that some teachers are heroic.
Hirsch thinks this is much of the reason for the big socio-economic divide in the US. I think this is also very relevant in Norway.
One thing is of course that I wish there was much more literature and art and things like that in school, and that all kids got more of it no matter who their parents are.
From a letter to a literary critic at NRK, February 2025
The curriculum the publishers could read
E. D. Hirsch wrote in his book that when France had a very clear national curriculum, there were a number of advantages in that for example different publishers could make books for the summer vacation that repeated what you had learned and what you were going to learn in different ways (competition) because you knew what a third grader was supposed to have learned, and what might be hard in fourth grade and that it would be good to prepare for...
Why on earth should every elementary school teacher in Norway invent their own curriculum from scratch?
What I'm not claiming
How important is it for society that people have a good cultural "overview"/"Bildung"? I instinctively think it is, but if I have to be honest with myself it's a bit hard to argue... Norway is doing "fine" after all... in Italy they have an incredible amount more classical culture in school — is the democracy or the public debate any more sophisticated? Are people happier?
I'm not a teacher, and never have been (outside of university) and there are probably a lot of practical things about being a teacher, and the regulations they have to deal with, that I don't know about. I don't know enough about what actually happens in school today. I don't know enough about the debates there have been in Norway around curricula etc.
I was a researcher in education after all (PhD and postdoc) and looking back everything we were doing seems so meaningless — compared to the incredibly low-hanging fruit that nobody is picking. The incredible thing is that during my whole education we never opened a textbook, and never looked at a national curriculum...
And for adults?
Even though I've always been a bookworm, it's only as an adult that I've started to discover more classical literature — suddenly I'm reading Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dante, the Aeneid, the Iliad etc. And not only are they fantastic literary works in themselves, but they've shaped our whole culture to such an incredible degree, so many references, artworks, music, literature, political discussion that can't be understood without that basic backdrop...
From a letter to an author, August 2024
Tons of things you've barely heard of, but without anything being connected to anything else, and it all just turns to mush. Reading Sapiens or Guns, germs and Steel and other "macro histories" is exciting, but it doesn't make things one bit better if you don't have a basic framework to hang things on...
From a letter to a teacher at Humanistskolen in Oslo, August 2025