Hidden curriculum

Any type of learning experience may include unintended lessons. However, the concept of a hidden curriculum often refers to knowledge gained specifically in primary and secondary school settings. In these scenarios the school strives, as a positive goal, for equal intellectual development among its students, but the hidden curriculum reinforces existing social inequalities through the education of students according to their class and social status. The distribution of knowledge among students is mirrored by the unequal distribution of cultural capital.

The hidden curriculum can also be seen as a set of norms and behaviors that are not explicitly taught, and students with limited social awareness, such as students with autism spectrum disorder, may not pick up on these norms without having them be explained directly. This set of norms and behaviors also regards the culture of an environment that is unique to that environment, for example the norms and expectations of an office space would vary from those of a classroom.

Breaktime is also a source of hidden curriculum in schooling. Students have more freedom of movement and interaction during these periods; this can facilitate unspoken lessons concerning clique formation and bullying, choice of recreation, self-expression, and conflict resolution.

History of research

Early educationalists explicitly endorsed the idea that education should be about the preservation of the social privileges, interests, and knowledge of one group within the population at the expense of less powerful groups. Over time, fewer people have subscribed explicitly to this view, yet education systems frequently continue to entrench social hierarchies. The concept of the hidden curriculum was one key effort to explain how education enables this socially conservative outcome and to illustrate the role that schools play in socialization.

Although he did not use the term, John Dewey explored the hidden curriculum of education in his early twentieth-century works, especially in his classic Democracy and Education. Dewey saw patterns evolving and trends developing in public schools which lent themselves to his pro-democratic perspectives. His work was quickly rebutted by educational theorist George Counts, whose 1929 book Dare the School Build a New Social Order? challenged Dewey's works. Counts claimed that Dewey hypothesized a singular path through which all young people travelled in order to become adults without considering the reactive, adaptive, and multifaceted nature of learning. Counts emphasized that this characteristic of learning caused many educators to slant their perspectives, practices, and assessments of student performance in directions that affected their students drastically. Counts' examinations were expanded on by Charles A. Beard and, later, Myles Horton who created what became the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

The phrase "hidden curriculum" was coined by Philip W. Jackson (Life In Classrooms, 1968). He argued that we need to understand "education" as a socialization process. Shortly after Jackson's coining of the term, MIT's Benson Snyder published The Hidden Curriculum, which addresses the question of why students—even, or especially, the most gifted—turn away from education. Snyder advocates the thesis that much of campus conflict and students' personal anxiety is caused by a mass of unstated academic and social norms, which thwart the students' abilities to develop independently and think creatively.

The hidden curriculum has been further explored by a number of educators. Starting with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1972, through the late 1990s, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire explored various effects of presumptive teaching on students, schools, and society as a whole. Freire's explorations were in sync with those of John Holt and Ivan Illich, each of whom were quickly identified as radical educators. Other theorists who have identified the nature of hidden curricula and hidden agendas include Neil Postman, Paul Goodman, Joel Spring, John Taylor Gatto, and others.

More recent definitions have been given by Roland Meighan ("A Sociology of Education," 1981) and Michael Haralambos ("Sociology: Themes and Perspectives," 1991). Meighan wrote, "The hidden curriculum is not taught by the school, and by any teacher... something is coming across to the pupils which may never be spoken in the English lesson or prayed about in assembly. They are picking-up an approach to living and an attitude to learning." Haralambos wrote, "The hidden curriculum consists of those things pupils learn through the experience of attending school rather than the stated educational objectives of such institutions."

Further, educational critics Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Jonathan Kozol have also examined the effects of the hidden curriculum. Theoretical inquiries into the hidden curriculum, as cited by Henry Giroux and Anthony Penna in 1983, include for example a structural-functional view of education, a phenomenological view related to the "new" sociology of education, and a radical critical view corresponding to the neo-Marxist analysis of the theory and practice of education. The structural-functional view focuses on how norms and values are conveyed within schools and the acceptance of the idea that those norms and values are necessary for the functioning of society. The phenomenological view suggests that meaning is created through situational encounters and interactions, and it implies that knowledge is somewhat objective. The radical critical view recognizes the relationship between economic and cultural reproduction and stresses the relationships among the theory, ideology, and social practice of learning. Although the first two theories have contributed to the analysis of the hidden curriculum, the radical critical view of schooling provides the most insight. Additionally, it acknowledges the perpetuated economic and social aspects of education that are illustrated by the hidden curriculum.

Additionally, developmental psychologist Robert Kegan addressed the hidden curriculum of everyday life in his 1994 book In Over Our Heads, which focused on the relation between cognitive development and the "cognitive demands" of cultural expectations.

Professor of communication Joseph Turow, in his 2017 book The Aisles Have Eyes, used the concept to describe acculturation to massive personal data collection; he wrote, "The very activities that dismay privacy and anti-discrimination advocates are already beginning to become everyday habits in American lives, and part of Americans' cultural routines. Retailing is at the leading edge of a new hidden curriculum for American society—teaching people what they have to give up in order to get along in the twenty-first century."