Pugach, Marleen C. (2006). Because teaching matters, (pp. 134-142). Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Due before class time next Monday January 18th.
1. Find (and record in your response) a useful definition of curriculum on p. 134.
2. In what ways do Middle Years kids know about the hidden curriculum?
3. Think about the type of seating in your classrooms when you were a Middle Years
student (for example, in Grade 7). Were you and your classmates seated in desks? On
chairs at tables? Some other form of seating? What might be the hidden curriculum of
that type of seating?
4. Think about some other physical aspect of your school when you were a Middle Years
student. Interpret the hidden curriculum of that physical aspect of your school.
5. Come to class ready to talk about the good and the bad (and the ugly?) of hidden
curriculum.
6. How do you like the “school lunch” conception of curriculum and pedagogy?
7. Come to class ready to share an example (preferably from your experience) of a Middle
Years kid who was excluded because they didn’t “get” the hidden curriculum or
because the hidden curriculum worked against them.
8. Identify one aspect of hidden curriculum that you would like to try to alter or challenge,
and explain how you might go about altering/challenging it thru your own teaching.
page 134
Even though we generally think of schools as places where children learn
academics, students learn a lot more in school than just what is in the explicit curriculum.
Simply by virtue of being in school every day, students learn many “lessons” beyond the
academic curriculum — lessons about the purposes of schools, what students need to do to
please teachers, what is important in schools and to teachers, who is recognized, and much,
much more. Schools are social institutions, and since students spend at least 12 years of
their lives in schools, they are not oblivious to how these institutions operate. In fact, they
are often quite astute observers of their schools. We considered the classroom as a culture
in Chapter 2. We can also think of the school as a culture, with its own traditions, practices,
and values. The unanticipated “lessons” students learn by participating in this culture, these
“by-products” of being in school, can be either a positive or a negative force in a student’s
school experience.
Because schools teach more than just the academic curriculum, teachers need to be
aware not only of their obligations regarding content and the explicit curriculum, but also
the ways the organization and structure of the school and their classroom affect their
students. Are the students happy in school? Are they involved? Are they productive? Do
students get along? When students encounter problems, are these handled in a way that
supports students? Teachers must take responsibility for the kinds of teaching and learning
environments they create both at the school and classroom level, and for the
messages students take away from these environments. To do this, they must first realize
that “as teachers, all the decisions we make, no matter how neutral they seem, may impact
in unconscious but fundamental ways the lives and experiences of our students” (Nieto,
1996, p. 318).
In order to teach the academic curriculum well, teachers must place a high value
on the overall well-being of their students. All students
are individuals who live in specific social and
Critical term: hidden
economic circumstances and attend school in a
curriculum. The unstated
specific social context. Some students, like James and
outcomes of education that
Monique, may live in particularly difficult
students experience and learn
circumstances. Therefore, it is not enough to consider
by spending time in schools.
your students simply as neutral learners. Being in
These outcomes may be
school can strengthen or diminish students’ well being,
intended or unintended,
and for this reason all education professionals are
positive or negative.
obligated to work toward making schools places
where students thrive.
From Chapter 4 you already have a sense of where the academic curriculum comes
from. In this chapter, we will explore a much broader definition of curriculum — that is,
curriculum defined as the sum total of a student’s experience in school. We will consider
this issue from two perspectives: (1) the hidden messages students get while attending
school, and (2) how schools as institutions respond to students’ changing social needs in a
changing social context. Finally, we will see how these dimensions affect the lives of
teachers and the decisions they make.
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The Power of the Hidden Curriculum
The unarticulated lessons students learn and the messages they receive as a result
of attending school do not appear in the formal academic curriculum. Yet their collective
impact has been deemed so important by educators that it has acquired its own name: the
hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968). The hidden curriculum can be thought of as
everything students learn in schools that is not explicitly laid out in the academic
curriculum — whether it is intended or unintended (Tanner & Tanner, 1980). Although the
hidden curriculum was initially defined as the unintended results of schooling, today many
would argue that what at first appear to be unintended outcomes are often intended ones
— outcomes that may systematically benefit different groups of students.
The hidden curriculum is a companion concept to the explicit curriculum and the
null curriculum discussed in Chapter 4. It represents real learning but not the kind one may
readily associate with conventional notions of what schooling is for — that is, academic
learning. The concept of the hidden curriculum is a powerful way of understanding the
total experience children and youth have in school. It is a vital concept mainly because
once we realize that this “curriculum” also exists, we accept that in addition to academic
outcomes, an unofficial, unvoiced set of other outcomes also result from attending school,
outcomes for which teachers and administrators have responsibility.
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The Hidden Curriculum and the School as a Culture
Much like a classroom can be thought of as a culture with its own set of customs,
assumptions, and expectations, schools, too, can be regarded as cultures. If you think of
schools from this perspective, you can begin to understand the concept of the hidden
curriculum. In the same way that the official academic curriculum is a statement of values
about what is important to learn, the atmosphere and expectations that are constructed in a
school also represent a statement of values. We do not usually question the assumed values
and expectations that fall outside the academic curriculum, but they represent enduring
features of schooling nevertheless. Precisely because they are so embedded in how schools
operate, we rarely question or discuss them. This is why they function as a hidden
curriculum.
The hidden curriculum, though unspoken, operates so regularly in schools that it
would be nearly impossible for students to miss its message. Eliot Eisner (1979) prefers
the term implicit curriculum (1979) to hidden curriculum, signifying that these
expectations, or outcomes, are implicit
in the act of attending school. He
describes the phenomenon as follows:
Thus, the implicit curriculum of a
school is what it teaches because of the
kind of place it is. And the school is that
kind of place through the ancillary
consequences of various approaches to
teaching, by the kind of reward system
it uses, by the organizational structure
it employs to sustain its existence, by
the physical characteristics of the
Students learn more than just academics
school plant, by the furniture it uses and
when they spend time in school. (Digital
the surroundings
it
creates.
Vision)
These
characteristics constitute some of the dominant components of the school’s implicit
curriculum. Although these features are seldom publicly announced, they are
intuitively recognized by parents, students, and teachers. And because they are
salient and pervasive features of schooling, what they teach may be among the most
important lessons a child learns. (Eisner, 1979, pp. 82-83)
For example, one common feature in most schools is grouping students in classes
with peers of the same age. This fact of schooling provides a lesson to students about the
value of working with those of your own age — and devalues the power of cross-age peer
learning and tutoring. Nowhere in the formal curriculum is it stated that students are better
off in same-age classes or even that such classes are desirable. But that is what most
schools assume. So it is, in effect, a “hidden” outcome learned as a result of spending time
in school — and hence, an example of the hidden curriculum. As we will
see in Chapter 8, some schools defy this cultural norm by practicing multi-age grouping
and so send a different hidden message than that communicated in most schools.
In most schools it is assumed that teachers have greater power than students. After
all, teachers organize the curriculum, develop activities and projects, construct and grade
tests, and generally run the show. Frederick Erickson, the scholar of classroom culture
mentioned in Chapter 2, commented on this assumption as follows: “Classrooms are
characterized by marked asymmetry of form and informal rights and obligations among
participants. Formally and informally the roles of teacher and student are asymmetric”
(Erickson & Shultz, 1992, p. 469). Year after year students learn that this asymmetrical
relationship is a regular part of the schooling and that only rarely do students themselves
have greater say than their teachers. It can be done otherwise, and schools and philosophies
exist in which there are less hierarchical definitions of the teacher-student relationship. But
common practice in Canada is an hierarchical one.
What about the seemingly simple question of furniture that Eisner raises as an issue
related to the hidden curriculum? The arrangement of your classroom sends
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a message to the students you
teach. If each desk stands in
isolation, this conveys the idea
that working in isolation is
valued. When desks are paired
or arranged in groups, a
different message is sent,
creating the possibility for
shared tasks. If you have
movable desks but students
always face the teacher and
never regroup for purposes of
class discussion, it’s likely that
fewer students will participate,
especially those who sit in the
back rows, without heavy
Big decisions about how to interact with students or
prodding by the teacher. This
organize the classroom, as well as smaller decisions
also sends a particular message
such as seating patterns and the arrangement of
— that students who sit in the
furniture, all communicate messages to students about
back of the classroom may not
why they are at school. (Michael J. Doolittle/The
be expected to participate
Image Works)
regularly or to be fully engaged
in the lesson. And if the furniture is screwed to the floor, as it often is in large lecture halls,
the instructor is, in essence, stuck with the message that instruction is to proceed in lecture
format in front of a large group.
As another example, until the advent of cell phones, teachers could only
communicate with families after school hours and at appointed conference times. Most
schools had only a single telephone line teachers could use, and it was typically located in
a public place, so that holding a private conversation was nearly impossible. The message
this arrangement sent was that teachers could not easily contact the parents and families of
their students and that doing so was not a high priority. In contrast, today many teachers
have cell phones in their classrooms and use them to keep in touch with family members
and even, on occasion, to have students talk with their family members during the day in
relationship to problems that may arise. The context of schooling changes significantly
when students call their families with a teacher standing right there, in close proximity,
rather than waiting to see if their teacher might call home in the evening. This creates a
very different set of relationships between teachers and parents or guardians.
The hidden curriculum is the result of decisions made by educators regarding how
schools should work — even if those decisions were made a long time ago and are in place
today simply by force of tradition and custom. Seymour Sarason (1982), an astute observer
of schooling, calls the unexamined practices that have resulted from these past decisions
and traditions the regularities of schooling. He states that recognizing these regularities,
or patterns, is critical because if they are not
acknowledged in the first place, we cannot even begin to imagine Critical
term:
changing them. If some of these regularities of schooling are not regularities
of
the best way to support student learning, then recognizing them schooling. A term
and talking about them are the first steps to creating new coined
by
regularities with more beneficial outcomes.
Seymour Sarason
The hidden curriculum operates at every level at which to describe the
decisions are made and directly influences how students traditions
and
experience school. Every decision regardless of whether it has practices
of
been thought through explicitly represents some kind of purpose. schooling that are
What patterns exist in enrolling students in Advanced Placement taken for granted
classes in high school? Which students are represented in leading and
are
not
roles in school plays? Are those elected to student council year questioned – even
after year representative of the entire student body or rather of a though schooling
narrow group? If there are separate classes for students who are could be organized
identified as gifted and talented, who ends up in those classes, and and carried out in
who does not? These are all examples of the hidden curriculum.
other ways.
page 138
As a new teacher, you will find many of the regularities of the school culture
determined for you. However, within your own classroom you do have control over many
of the choices you make about what kind of experience you create for your students.
Whether or not these choices are directly related to the academic curriculum, they influence
how your students experience school. Every choice you make about how you organize and
deliver the academic curriculum carries with it implicit messages about the kind of place
your classroom is.
For example, if you are planning to be an upper elementary or middle school
teacher, you may decide to structure your curriculum around a series of contemporary
problems (e.g., environmental protection or segregated housing patterns) and integrate
reading, mathematics, social studies, and science as you address these problems. This is a
curriculum approach that may not be dictated at the school level. If you make this choice,
the hidden message you are sending is that the traditional academic subjects are [not] useful
for studying complex problems. Similarly, if you are a high school physics teacher, you
may choose to teach chapter by chapter in the book with few demonstrations, or you may
elect to make demonstrations of physical phenomena a centerpiece of your teaching. If you
choose the latter, you are communicating the hidden message that as a teacher, you value
having the students observe and interact with the phenomena they are studying.
As another example, if you are a first grade teacher, you may choose to teach your
students to take responsibility for retrieving materials from around the class room or for
choosing activities for specific times in the day. When you teach your students to take on
these responsibilities (and you will have to teach them specifically how to do this at this
age), you are communicating the idea that in your class room, you trust them to take on
this level of responsibility. If you pass out all materials yourself and control all choices for
the students, the message they receive is that they are not ready to exercise any freedom of
choice within the classroom.
As Sarason points out, many of the regularities and hidden outcomes of P-12
schooling can be changed, depending on the political pressure that operates in a school or
local district. When various people in powerful positions are wedded to the fundamental
purposes of the hidden curriculum, it may be difficult to change. However, we cannot
assume that all implicit, or hidden, outcomes of schooling are problematic. Some may be
beneficial to students, whereas others may be detrimental.
Benefits of the Hidden Curriculum
What benefits might accrue to
students as a result of spending time in
schools? Obviously, the answer to this
question depends on the particular school and
school district the students attend, but we can
identify some general factors that are often
said to have a positive effect on students.
School provides the opportunity to
learn and practice the social skills associated
with being part of a group. This opportunity
arises naturally since students go
Every day they are in the classroom,
teachers convey messages about who
they believe can or cannot learn
rigorous material in school. (Digital
page 139
to school with lots of other students and interact directly with themVision)
every school day. Social
learning includes learning to listen, share, take turns, and work with others. Depending on
the demographic makeup of the school, education also includes learning to be part of a
classroom community with students of different backgrounds and life experiences. In any
individual classroom, the proportion of group interaction, and thus the potential for social
learning, depends on how a teacher chooses to organize the work. The “hidden” social
learning outcomes of schooling are diminished when parents choose
to school their students at home (for a detailed discussion, see Chapter 9). Parents who
choose home schooling are opting for academic over social interaction benefits, or at least
over interaction with a diverse group of students.
Some would argue that another beneficial lesson of schooling is learning to take
responsibility. In the early grades students may take responsibility for smaller aspects of
their education, while as they progress to high school they take much greater responsibility
for their assignments, long-term projects, and so on. Completing homework may also be
interpreted as an example of students’ learning to take responsibility. As we will see in the
next section, some educators believe that students are not given enough responsibility for
their own learning.
Eisner (1979) identifies some additional potential benefits of being in school:
“punctuality, working hard on tasks that are not immediately enjoyable, and the ability to
defer immediate gratification in order to work for distant goals” (p. 81). To this list one
might add learning to follow directions and to get one’s work done in a timely fashion.
Depending on the quality of the teaching to which they are exposed, students may also
learn that learning is exciting, that the study of various subjects is stimulating, and that
academic skills can be applied to many problems and situations both inside and outside of
schools.
Liabilities of the Hidden Curriculum
The hidden curriculum is more often seen as a liability than as a benefit. Two issues
are usually raised with regard to the hidden curriculum as a negative force in school: (1)
the issue of the passive nature of much educational practice; and (2) the issue of whether
schooling differentially favors those who already come to school with social and economic
privileges. Both have long histories as political critiques of schooling.
Education as a Passive Experience. The typical organization of schooling has
long been seen as teaching students to be passive consumers of a not-too-interesting
education. Instead of motivating students to explore academic areas in which they are
passionately interested and to engage them in authentic problems in which they are
invested, schools are said to lock students into a life of rote, boring encounters with the
curriculum. The structure of the explicit curriculum itself
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and its ubiquitous presence in the classroom can potentially have a detrimental impact on
how students think about the process of learning — and on what they actually learn. As a
result, the hidden message students may come away with is that learning is boring and that
any excitement they may feel about academic subjects occurs outside of school. Erickson
and Shultz (1992) use the comical metaphor of the school lunch to capture students’ passive
consumption of the curriculum:
In ordinary classroom practice in US schools it appears that the reigning conception
of curriculum and pedagogy is that of school lunch. It is as if the job of the teacher
were to take packages of mind-food from the freezer (the curriculum), thaw them
in a microwave (instruction), and see to it that the
students eat it until it is finished (classroom management to maximize time on task).
It is not the teacher’s responsibility (nor that of the student) to decide what or how
much should be eaten or when and how long mealtime should be. Not only is the
food served entirely prepackaged but much of each student’s daily portion is
chopped into small bits, boiled, or mashed in an attempt at predigestion that lowers
its basic nutritional content. Moreover, large amounts of sugar, salt and fat are
found in the food. Although these substances enhance palatability somewhat, they
are deleterious for the students’ long-term health and well-being. (p. 467)
In this ironic view of students’ experience of schooling, Erickson and Shultz (1992)
raise serious questions about the structure of the curriculum when teachers merely follow
it explicitly and deliver it without consideration of how to teach it well to their particular
group of students. This view also raises questions about what messages students are
receiving when teachers choose to follow the explicit curriculum narrowly. These authors
also lampoon the “dumbing down” of the curriculum and the tendency to teach specific
aspects of it as isolated, small segments of information rather than in a context of
meaningful classroom experiences. Their metaphor seeks to imply, of course, that no
student should be subjected to the “school lunch” philosophy of experiencing school.
Schooling should not result in students disliking learning, but instead should be rich with
experiences that convey the message that learning is exciting, motivating, highly integrated
across subjects, and meaningful.
Certainly, not all teachers and all schools provide a “school lunch” learning
experience. However, through this metaphor Erickson and Shultz are pointing out that
given the demands of the academic curriculum and additional pressure to meet curriculum
standards, it is all too easy to create this kind of educational experience.
The Hidden Curriculum and the Question of Privilege. One of the most
contentious issues related to the hidden curriculum is whether schools are intentionally
designed to promote the academic achievement of every
Critical term: critical
student, or whether by design some groups of students
theory. Analysis of
systematically have much less chance of achieving well. The
education that focuses
argument that schools are not created to ensure that everyone
on understanding and
learns at high intellectual levels is based in the belief that the
changing structural
purpose of school is to reproduce the existing, dominant
inequities that
economic system. From this perspective, which is called
systematically
advantage certain
page 141
groups of students
over others.
critical theory, the idea is that those who come to school
privileged continue to be privileged, receiving better education and better opportunities for
advancement than those who are not so privileged. Instead of leveling the playing field,
these critics argue, schooling can reinforce existing socioeconomic divisions among
students, failing to serve all students well and making it difficult, if not impossible for
students in lower socioeconomic classes to gain the education they need to move up the
economic ladder. We will explore this issue in much greater depth in Chapter 6.
Kenneth Sirotnik (1991) cites some essential questions he believes critical scholars
of education must ask: “Whose interests are, and are not, being served by the way things
are?” and “How did it come to be this way?” (pp. 250-251). By asking questions about “the
way things are,” Sirotnik invokes the concept of the hidden curriculum and challenges the
reader to make the implicit purposes of schooling visible. For example, if urban and rural
schools consistently receive less funding than suburban schools, the inequitable
distribution of resources disadvantages urban and rural students. If teachers do not believe
that racial and ethnic minority students, or students whose first language is not English, are
capable of high levels of intellectual challenge, these teachers can contribute to a cycle of
poverty and low-level jobs and aspirations for their students. If guidance counselors often
advise racial and ethnic minority students and students from low socioeconomic levels to
consider the military or technical school upon graduation, but often advise middle- and
upper-middle-class students to pursue a college track, then that school is differentially
advancing the interests of students from higher socioeconomic classes. These are all
instances of how the hidden curriculum operates as a powerful negative force every day in
school. By maintaining a cycle of low achievement for some students and high expectations
for the already privileged, teachers may help reproduce the socioeconomic structure of
society.
In a famous study comparing working-class, middle-class, and upper-class
elementary schools, Jean Anyon (1981) described how schools in poorer areas did not
challenge students intellectually and exposed them to a much more rote approach to
learning than was used for students in higher income neighborhoods. Depending on where
they attend school, students may learn that their teachers care a great deal about their
achievement or that their teachers believe they are not capable of learning complex
material. As the following Case in Point illustrates, even a seemingly neutral lesson may
carry a powerful negative message from a teacher.
∞∞∞
A CASE IN POINT
Current Events as the Hidden Curriculum
Harper Lee, author of the classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird,
weighs in on the hidden curriculum as a negative force in students’
experience of school in her description of required current events in the third
grade classroom of the novel’s main character, Scout Finch. The unintended
outcome of this seemingly innocuous, simple activity operated against
students who were already at a disadvantage in school. A character wise
beyond her years, Scout appears to understand a great deal about the hidden
curriculum and the implicit outcomes of schooling.
Once a week we had a Current Events period. Each child was
supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and
reveal them to the class. This practice encouraged good posture and
gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made
him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his
memory;
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being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the
Group.
The idea was profound, but as usual, in Maycomb it didn’t
work very well. In the first place, few rural children had access to
newspapers, so the burden of current events was borne by the town
children, convincing the bus children more deeply that the town
children got all the attention anyway. The rural children who could,
usually brought clippings from what they called The Grit Paper, a
publication spurious in the eyes of Miss Gates, our teacher. Why
she frowned when a child recited from The Grit Paper, I never knew,
but in some way it was associated with fiddling, eating syrupy
biscuits for lunch, being a holy-roller, singing Sweetly Sings the
Donkey and pronouncing it dunkey, all of which the state paid
teachers to discourage (pp. 279-280).
While Scout Finch certainly understood how the experience of
schooling for white town children differed from that of white rural children
and how the same educational setting can hold profoundly different
meaning for students in different socioeconomic groups, it is likely that
Miss Gates did not think twice about what she was communicating to the
poor rural students in her classes.
Your turn ...
How could Miss Gates have changed the hidden curriculum around
current events in her class room? Can you think of a similar example from
your own schooling?
∞∞∞
The Hidden Curriculum as a Commentary on the Social
Purposes of Schooling
The choices teachers make about how to structure their classes have profound social
consequences for students. Every choice a teacher or a school or a school district makes
affects how students feel, how they believe they are valued, and what they believe they can
do academically and socially. Every choice sends messages to students about the purpose
of their time in school. If teachers challenge students wisely, then students learn that their
teachers wish to develop their intellects. If teachers extend a hand to help struggling
students, then students learn that their teachers want everyone to learn, and not just those
to whom learning comes easily. The hidden curriculum reminds teachers that
they are responsible for creating a total school experience that is fair, safe, and responsive
— in short, classrooms in which every student is motivated to learn.
The hidden curriculum also sends messages to students about how the school
responds to their particular social circumstances outside of school. It is this topic we
explore next.