Life in Classrooms

With its reflective examination of the social conditions of classroom life, Philip W. Jackson's Life in Classrooms became a touchstone in the dramatic expansion of the concept of curriculum in the second half of the 20th century. Jackson's combination of an ethnographic study of classroom life and quantitative analyses of student and teacher experience revealed that much more was taught in school than the explicit subject matter and that the most lasting lessons might not be intended at all.

The book is divided into 5 chapters. The first chapter, “The Daily Grind,” describes familiar classroom conditions, showing how the crowds, praise, and power that typify classroom life dominate children's experience and shape their developing role as students. Because schoolchildren typically live in a world with one adult and a score or more other children, they inevitably encounter delay, denial, interruption, and distraction. How children respond to these deterrents determines [Page 547]whether or not they receive praise and approval from the teacher. To be seen as successful, children learn to accept authority and to adapt to institutional conformity. This hidden curriculum is seen by Jackson as both supporting and competing with the official curriculum.

The second and third chapters draw on numerous quantitative studies to argue that despite the compulsory routine of classroom life most children do not seem to have strong feelings about school and that inattention or disengagement may say more about the experience of going to school than about the contents of the curriculum. Remaining uninvolved can be a way for students to resist the messages of the hidden curriculum.

In the fourth chapter, interviews with 50 teachers reveal a tender-minded, idealized view of children that Jackson argues fits the teachers' dual role as both agents of the institution and protectors of the children who attend it. In the final chapter, Jackson questions whether learning theory or human engineering, however scientifically based, can successfully guide teaching and urges that a better goal than seeking to engineer perfect teaching is seeking to understand teaching.

Rather than a single-minded argument for reform, Life in Classrooms presents a complex portrait of schooling in which different readers have found different messages. The introduction of the hidden curriculum has provided reconceptual-ists, critical theorists, feminists, multiculturalists, and other curriculum scholars critical of schooling with a mechanism to explain how dominant groups use schools to maintain their legitimacy. The methodology of the book, especially its first chapter, encouraged the development of ethnographic curriculum research that focuses more on what students learn than on what teachers plan. The call to seek an understanding of teaching rather than to prescribe how teaching should be done provided a basis for the move to see curriculum work as fundamentally a matter of understanding curriculum, rather than of developing curriculum. Finally, the mere announcement of a hidden curriculum led to other ways of distinguishing aspects or dimensions of curriculum official, intended, planned, taught, enacted, shadow, experienced, embodied, and null.

Although the hidden curriculum was almost immediately seen as the name for systematically generated, but undesirable learning outcomes in children, Life in Classrooms does not draw such a clear-cut conclusion. Although bringing attention to the demand (on both teachers and students) for institutional conformity, the book reveals the complicated interplay between students' psychological withdrawal and teachers' efforts to engage. By withdrawing (Jackson argues), students resist the demand for conformity; and by seeking to make classroom life less regimented and more pleasurable, teachers diminish the significance of the demand for conformity.

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