Of Modern Education's Hidden Curricula

The contemporary reader of books written as late as the nineteenth century are apt to find them using a good many familiar words in unfamiliar ways, like "education"--today associated with a primarily academic schooling, but back then more often used to refer to the broader and fuller raising, upbringing, edification of a human being (as in The Education of Henry Adams).

Where education in today's narrower sense is concerned (though one can also see it as relevant to our "education" in the broader sense), some have spoken of "hidden curricula." Those writing of the hidden curriculum as, for example, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis did in their hugely important Schooling in Capitalist America tend to mean by it the fact that the American public school as classically constituted not only taught the officially emphasized "Three Rs" of readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmetic, but the unofficially yet no less importantly emphasized obedience to authority, diligence in assigned tasks of no intrinsic interest to them, punctuality, the tolerance of boredom and physical or mental discomfort, self-identification with group and task, etc.. Reflecting the fact that the intent was not to educate an elite but rather a working class that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, elites wanted conditioned for work in mills and factories requiring persons as close to the old employer's ideal of the "animated instrument" as possible. (Indeed, the hidden curriculum can often seem to take precedence over the open academic one, and a student's assimilating it be the more important in determining their life outcome.)

Still, one can argue that this is not the only hidden curriculum at work, with what some have said about the male upbringing traditionally (which, given changes in expectations about gender, seems to apply increasingly to women as well) as one deliberately brutal and brutalizing for the sake of preparing them for a brutal and brutalizing status-resource competition in adulthood seemingly relevant. The frequently severe, commonly punitive, often invidious character of so much of what goes on in the classroom, with its gradgrinding, its disciplinarianism tending toward what American soldiers once called "chickenshit,", its grading and its rankings, its subjection of students to so much experience of failure, inadequacy, inferiority, can certainly seem part of a hidden curriculum intended to teach that. So too such aspects of the matter as physical education with its heavy attention to sport and its mentality; the social dynamics among the students that reproduce the social hierarchies and pressures for conformity existing in society broadly; the "No one likes a tattletale" tolerance of schoolyard cruelties like bullying; and much, much else the cultural traditionalist hastens to defend with such profundities as "Boys will be boys."

However much some will hasten to defend them, the two curricula are far from perfect means of realizing their own purposes. Most obviously the two curricula clash with each other, with the training to be an animated instrument clashing with the training to be a brutally self-seeking competitor, all as there are other dissonances. Certainly the hidden, behaviorally-oriented curriculum makes students cynical about even their most essential academic training as merely a set of hoops to be jumped through (with all that means for their ability or willingness to be serious about learning anything), and this just the tip of the iceberg where the associated alienations are concerned, from which some suffer more than others. Even going beyond the more socially recognized forms of marginalization (race, gender) to consider those all too often mischaracterized as "privileged," there is little question that those who are in other ways socially disadvantaged (e.g. working class, as most Americans actually are, even as the media presents a middle classness that is probably really the low end of "rich" as the societal norm), or who are "different" or more sensitive than others, or "creative" or "independent," or introverted or neuroatypical, or just awkward or unlucky, or any of a great many other things, suffer more injury from the arrangement than their peers who are not, with this frankly a feature rather than a bug (such traits are not desired by the System, and the people in whom such traits are not valued), and in many a case carry around more hurt from the injuries as a result (the sensitive, the introverted, etc. taking life's blows all harder, with these blows in childhood and youth no exception).

Indeed, it seems a great many of the more vulnerable or less fortunate suffer and hurt enough that rather than making them into the self-interestedly competitive animated instruments society demands much of what they experience in this "schooling" turns them away from all that, turning people who under less wretched circumstances might have been high achievers making exceptional "contributions to society" toward rejecting "the game" altogether, and spending their lives going through the motions because life has left them with no other choice, and at the same time nothing more to hope for than going along to get along. Or pursuing hopeless "fantasy" careers that are if anything more likely to worsen their alienation as they much more often than not find their usually painful and lonely pursuit of the life they hope for thwarted. (How many set out to be writers, for example, in part because this seems their only chance to escape all that they would rather not endure in life?) Or, if they can get away with it, for as long as they can get away with it, spending their days playing video games in a parent's basement, as (speaking from responses I have seen to my own scholarship and media-cited publications about social withdrawal in online fora!) they envision "the good society" as one that will leave the unwanted in peace to do that. Faced with all that it is truly the stupid whose only answer is to display the conspicuous callousness of snarling "Suck it up" in their faces, and indeed not just the situation but the discourse about it yet more wearisome testimony to the synonymousness of the conventional wisdom with injustice, misery and brutality-apologizing and admiring pessimism, misanthropy and authoritarianism.