Hidden Curriculum

The Structural-Functional Approach

In a germinal 1959 article, Talcott Parsons described school classes as agencies of “manpower allocation” where academic achievement and ascribed qualities like family class background contribute to the reproduction of social stratification. In U.S. schools, he argued, children had to be inculcated with particular views of “achievement” and “equality of opportunity.” Parsonian structural-functionalism contended that schools must teach that inequality is the legitimate consequence of differences in educational attainment. Following Parsons, qualitative researchers observed public grade school classrooms in efforts to identify the actual practices that accomplished socialization and sorting. Philip Jackson described values, dispositions, and social behaviors that were rewarded by teachers, and coined the term hidden curriculum to describe disciplines that were essential for school progress, for example, waiting quietly, exercising restraint, trying, completing work, keeping busy, cooperating, showing allegiance, being neat, being punctual, and being courteous. Other hidden elements of curriculum are embedded in mechanisms and apparatuses, including the built environment of the school and classroom; textbooks; uniforms; gender roles enacted by students, teachers, and administrators; tracking systems; the hierarchy of knowledge and school subjects; and the competitive/cooperative lessons of sports, contests, and academic performance.

The Neo-Marxist Approach

Beginning in the 1970s, neo-Marxist educational researchers reexamined hidden curricula. Social reproduction, they contended, includes the reproduction of illegitimate inequalities including social class, race, and gender. Two economists, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, wrote an influential study showing how school norms “corresponded” with capitalist class structures of workers, managers, and owners. Students from different social classes are subject to different curricula, scholarly expectations, types of schoolwork, and treatment by teachers. Schools send silent but powerful messages to students with regard to intellectual ability, personal traits, and occupational choice. Here also, qualitative researchers examined how students in upper-class communities were inculcated with the drive to achieve, whereas those in working-class schools rehearsed disciplines appropriate for low-skill, low-autonomy work.

Resistance Theory

By the 1980s both functionalist and Marxist structuralist accounts were challenged by a group of critical theorists who criticized the concept of hidden curricula for assuming that students were passive recipients and failing to acknowledge their ability to contest socialization or to make meaning of it for themselves. Moreover, school curricula were the location of struggles and conflicts between students, teachers, administrators, and the citizenry. Hidden curriculum was thus an incomplete theory because it ignored human agency and conflict. The notion of “resistance” was proposed to challenge the oppressive nature of schooling.

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