The Hidden Curriculum of School
What school teaches us that we don't talk about.
You know how sometimes the thing that says it's doing one thing is really doing another? That's what a hidden curriculum is. It's the lessons that a system is actually teaching you, even while it claims to be doing something entirely different. It's the unspoken design of the system, the important stuff we don't say out loud.
I'm focused here on the hidden curriculum of school, but the hidden curriculum can apply to many other things. For example, in In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1994), Robert Kegan wrote about the hidden curriculum of everyday life.
Educator Philip Jackson coined the term Hidden Curriculum in this 1968 essay. My first exposure to the term was in John Taylor Gatto's work, which started for me with his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which Doc Searls sent me long ago, in an issue of The Sun.
Gatto writes from the heart (and deep experience) and minces no words. Here are some of his insights from that essay:
- Stay in the class where you belong.
- Turn on and off when I tell you to.
- Surrender your will to a predestined chain of command.
- Only I determine what curriculum you will study.
- Your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth.
- You are being watched (in school).
The first time you hear about this, it hits you in the gut, doesn't it? Parents aren't looking for this agenda when they put their kids in school, and teachers are mostly acting in good will to try to teach subject matters to children. But you can see how the structure of the institution, its processes and its norms, all feed the Hidden Curriculum.
Gatto went deeper in later writings, and others have expanded the list, or created versions of their own. To explore the broader context, here's how I've curated it in my outboard Brain (or open it in a new tab here):
The Hidden Curriculum inspired me to coin one of the outputs of schooling, which is the Modern OCD: Obedience, Compliance and Dependence. You'll see me referring to it in my TEDx talk.
The more I dwelt on the situation in schools, the more I realized that there were hidden architectures in other places. You'll notice in my Brain above "The Hidden Curriculum of School" lies a Thought titled "Hidden Architectures of Mistrust," which was my generalization of this phenomenon, and will feature in subsequent posts.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.