Hidden Curriculum

The term hidden curriculum has been used in two quite different ways in curriculum studies. The more common and influential usage refers to student learning that is not described by curriculum planners or teachers as an explicit aim of instruction even though it results from deliberate practices and organizational structures. As coined in 1968 by Philip W. Jackson in Life in Classrooms, the term was intended to bring attention to elementary-school learning that results from students' experience of the conditions of classroom life. Jackson argued that a good part of student success depends on learning how to live in a crowd of other students, how to gain praise from the teacher, and how to respond to the authority of the teacher and the institution. This curriculum is hidden in the sense that it is not included in institutional statements of expected learning outcomes and may not even be perceived by the teacher as an intended outcome of instruction. For Jackson, the existence of the hidden curriculum provided insight into some of the causes of student success and failure in school. Inability to master the hidden curriculum would hinder a student more and lead to more serious consequences than inability to master the explicit, discipline-based curriculum. Although this usage of hidden curriculum first appeared in Jackson's work, the notion of incidental learning or undirected experiences had been discussed by John Dewey and Franklin Bobbitt (and others) decades earlier.

A second usage of hidden curriculum appeared in 1970 in Benson R. Snyder's Hidden Curriculum. Where Jackson had been concerned with student learning that teachers do not intend and may not even be aware of, Snyder was concerned with knowledge students ought to acquire, but do not, because it is not part of the official curriculum. This second usage of hidden curriculum continues to be discussed (e.g., in literature concerning the education of autistic children), and it is sometimes conflated with the first usage.

By the 1980s, as reconceptualism and critical theory contributed new perspectives on curriculum studies, the concept of the hidden curriculum became an explanatory mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality. In Jackson's portrayal [Page 440]of school life, student responses to the hidden curriculum (adaptation to or rejection of the culture of school) were largely unintended by teachers and administrators, but the hidden curriculum soon came to be seen as a hidden agenda, a set of deliberate practices with intentional, and largely detrimental, outcomes. Scholars such as Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux saw the hidden curriculum as a tool deliberately used by dominant groups to maintain their social privilege. The supposed legitimacy of inequities based upon race and class could be implicitly taught to students through their experience of social life in the school and classroom, while official curriculum lessons about democracy and equality would be qualified or undercut by the structure and practices of schools.

Questions about whether (or how) students could resist the messages of the hidden curriculum were taken up by Apple and by Paul Willis, while Elizabeth Vallance argued that what was being called the hidden curriculum in the 1970s (the need to adopt personal traits consistent with the conditions of crowds, praise, and power) had been the official curriculum of 19th-century U.S. schools, which had explicitly sought to socialize students into the emerging industrial society. Society's acceptance of this dimension of “Americanization” made it unnecessary for the curriculum to be explicit in the 20th century.

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