Rethinking the Hidden Curriculum?

The concept of a hidden curriculum is one that seems to belong to a bygone educational age – one in which we could be genuinely critical of hidden educational processes. In today’s educational system the hidden curriculum is not only no-longer hidden, it seems to have managed to force itself squarely to the front and centre of a generalised curriculum that covers not only formal knowledge but also a range of informal ideas about schools and schooling (looking at you “British Values”).

So, has the concept had it’s day? Is the hidden curriculum no-longer hidden? And if so, is the concept now redundant? Or has the hidden curriculum simply evolved in new and interesting ways, the understanding of which your students can exploit to impress examiners who probably thought they’d seen it all?

In “Life in Classrooms” (1968), Phillip Jackson introduced the then-radical notion of a “hidden curriculum”. The idea that pupils didn’t just learn a formal curriculum of “official knowledge” – what Dewey called the “things considered worthy of being known” – they also learnt an unofficial curriculum of concealed knowledge consisting of “unwritten, unintended and unofficial” ideas.

For Jackson, the hidden curriculum represented a reappraisal of the role of schools and teachers. It wasn’t taught by any single teacher or insitution, but rather emerged from the overall structure, routines and social organisation of schooling itself. It involved, first-and-foremost, informal learning that occurred through school routines, rules and expectations.

Considered radical at the time, the kinds of ideas Jackson saw as being implicitly taught as part of a hidden curriculum – strict and unquestioning obedience to authority, the importance of time management and personal routines, competition, individualism and conformity to school norms – have arguably become, in the 21^st century, normalised in State schools in Britain and America.

The hidden curriculum is, in other words, no-longer covert; it has become an integral part of an educational discourse that teaches “National values” and a “school ethos” involving competition, individualism, conformity to authority and the like as part of the overall curriculum.

So, the obvious question here is that if the hidden curriculum is no-longer hidden why do we still have to learn about it?

And the less obvious answer is that the concept itself is still relevant to understanding what goes-on in schools because we need to change how we think about the content of this hidden curriculum: how the “informal learning that occurs through school routines, rules and expectations” has changed over the years – something that involves co-opting Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of cultural capital.

It’s Official…

While many sociological concepts (norms, deviance, moral panics, patriarchy, identity, masculinity, class, gender, ethnicity…) have found their way into the mainstream lexicon, the concept of cultural capital has gone a major step further by being officially embedded in Ofsted’s officially Education Inspection Framework (2019).

While this interpretation sees the concept embedded into the formal curriculum as a set of practices (trips to museums, theatres and historical sites, exposure to literature, music and art beyond pupils’ immediate backgrounds and learning vocabulary, general knowledge and social skills that support academic and life success) research by Khan (2011) allows us to reconceptualise it as a new form of hidden curriculum.

Khan’s Academy

Khan’s (2011) ethnographic study of an elite American Boarding School demonstrates how it’s possible to update the concept of a hidden curriculum by demonstrating how it is an integral aspect of class reproduction – the process by which upper class parents ensure their children maintain their elite status, power and influence in spite of modern education systems that don’t actively discriminate against students of different social backgrounds.

In this respect Kahn’s research shows how Bourdieu’s three types of cultural capital (embodied, objectified and institutionalised) uniquely combine in the intersection between the home and the school. The St. Paul’s students in the study were, for example, an almost uniquely privileged group possessing high levels of embodied capital (how they spoke, the language they used, their cultural knowledge of things like art and literature) and objectified capital, from the physical and cultural goods they owned, through the labels they wore to the very school they attended.

And attending the right school is significant because institutionalised capital – the academic degrees, professional qualifications and certifications that legitimise and officially recognise certain skills and knowledge – isn’t simply a function of wealth. Although the privileged position these students occupied in American society began with their parents wealth – not many can afford $72,000 (£54,000) a year for their child’s education – this doesn’t automatically guarantee educational success. It still has to be achieved, regardless of your parents’ wealth – or poverty.

And this is where we can reintroduce the concept of a hidden curriculum.

Easy Does It…

Khan argued the St Paul’s students were able to cultivate ease – a form of cultural capital that involves apparently effortless confidence in elite settings, such as speaking and presenting to an audience and networking with authority figures. Ease also encompassed being comfortable, or at-home, in a diverse range of social and cultural contexts in ways that suggested they naturally belonged in these settings. These were, to coin a phrase, their natural habitus.

In a similar way the students showed a sense of entitlement about things like their academic success without ever suggesting this was taken-for-granted. These students believed – and projected that belief – they belonged in positions of power and influence because they had earnt these privileges through their cultural performances (which included, of course, high academic achievement).

For Khan, therefore, the concept of ease showed how affluent students were able to navigate their way with confidence and a sense of entitlement through the education system, while simultaneously making the privilege they enjoyed appear normal, natural and unremarkable.

Key Takeaways

One of the key takeaways from Khan’s research is that education is not just about teaching knowledge and skills. Equally importantly it involves shaping dispositions and ease is seen in various ways to be a significant aspect of this hidden curriculum.

In addition to teaching a formal curriculum, St Paul’s trained the children of the rich to appear comfortable in demanding situations, to speak confidently and not to be afraid to ask demanding questions of their teachers. Another important component of the cultivation of ease was to see teachers as approachable and accountable rather than distant and intimidating – a relationship that is much easier to establish if your parents are rich, powerful, influential and their satisfaction or otherwise with a teacher’s performance is likely to have significant consequences for the latter’s  continued employment.

A further dimension to ease is how it seeps into the formal curriculum by encouraging students to be curious and challenging in their approach to knowledge and understanding. Seeing your social status as at least the equal of (and in reality, far higher than) those teaching you makes this process easier and leads to a sense of shared exploration rather than a situation in which the role of the student is simply to learn whatever they are given. This, in turn, leads to students approaching exams with a self-confidence and assurance built-up from a thorough understanding of the work they’ve been given.

In addition, it’s well-documented that teachers tend to respond positively and favourably towards students who appear confident and engaged in the classroom, something that once again reinforces academic success through a positive self-fulfilling feedback loop: students respond confidently to teachers who interpret this as a sign of intelligence and respond to this belief in ways that further boost their students’ confidence.

For Your Consideration…

A final point Khan noted is a distinct change in the way elites and elite students present themselves to the world. In the past self-presentation tended to emphasise ideas about birthright (“born leaders”), continuity and heritage (continuing the leadership roles established by their parents). In contemporary democratic societies, as these ideas have become less-acceptable and have consequently lost much of their impact, we’ve seen a cultural change towards the idea of effortless competence. Some groups are more-deserving of authority by virtue of their (supposedly) natural capabilities – their calmness under pressure and ability to deal equitably with different situations. They can demonstrate, in other words, they deserve to take-on powerful leadership roles once they leave school and enter the wider world.

In a Nutshell…

Although the school in Khan’s research was an expensive, elite, institution the same basic principle applies across the social spectrum. Middle class children achieve more than their working class peers, for example, precisely because they are more-comfortable in the middle-class atmosphere of State schools. They don’t have to learn educational norms – how they’re expected to speak and behave, how to present spoken and written arguments in ways that conform to teachers’ beliefs about what constitutes valid knowledge and valid ways of realising that knowledge and the like – that teachers’ assume to be the markers of intelligence.

In basic terms, just as the St. Paul’s students already knew how to move through elite institutions with confidence, fluency and a sense of belonging, the same is true, tom a lesser extent, for the rest of the education system. Middle class students, albeit in their own milieu, similarly move with a security and confidence largely lacking in their working class peers.

References

Shamus Khan: Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, (2011)

Phillip Jackson: Life in Classrooms (1968)

John Dewey: Democracy and Education (1916)

Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Capital (1977)