The gears of the hidden curriculum revisited (original) (raw)
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Doing School Time: The Hidden Curriculum Goes to Prison
The hidden curriculum is generally understood as the process by which daily exposure to school expectations and routines transmits norms and values of the dominant society to students. In the present, through the regimentation of thought, control of bodies and movement, and proliferation of punishment, contemporary accountability and testing produces the subjective conditions of precarious and servile wage work, as well as social marginalization more generally. Furthermore, we show that the schools, through the development of pervasive pedagogical and disciplinary techniques of control, become locations, like prisons, in which domination is expressed through the appropriation of time. Building from Michael
RETHINKING SCHOOL CURRICULUM AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Contemporary discourse about curriculum includes recognition that curricula can be analyzed at many levels and from many positions. 'By curriculum I mean what students have an opportunity to learn in school, through both the hidden and overt curriculum and what they do not have an opportunity to learn because certain matters were not included in the curriculum'. Nevertheless, the value of the term 'hidden curriculum' is that it draws attention to interpretations that have received little recognition in explicit curriculum discourse and which may serve as alternatives to the 'preferred meanings'. Differences in outcome are expected but are viewed as the inevitable result of variations in ability and motivation. The belief is that the system is fair as long as equal opportunity is guaranteed. However, critics have suggested that beneath the 'façade of meritocracy' lies a system which reproduces and legitimates existing economic inequalities (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 103). Others, while sharing a concern about the political dimensions of education, have cautioned against a deterministic view of education which ignores the contradictions and contestation which occur within the school (Apple, 1982). A more complete understanding of how ideologies work in schools requires examination of day-today school life (Apple and Weis, 1983). The central themes of this paper will not be dictated by the alleged boundaries between 'foundational' disciplines in education, nor by an unexamined division of the tasks of education and educational research between 'practitioners' and 'theorists', or between 'practitioners' and 'policy-makers'. On the contrary, one of the tasks is to demonstrate, through careful research and scholarship across a range of fields of practical, political and theoretical endeavor, just how outmoded, unproductive, and ultimately destructive these divisions are both for education and for educational research. These are enduring themes in this paper touching upon some of the central questions confronting our contemporary culture and, some would say, upon the central pathologies of contemporary society.
Moving Forward, Looking Back: Renewing the Struggle for an American Curriculum
Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, 2011
Rationales for public school reform in the United States are often tied to historical perspectives on the birth and development of schools and are buffeted by the assumption that the history of public schooling says much about how reform efforts should proceed. This interpretive article explores 2 such perspectives on 21st century schools: those of Diane Ravitch, distinguished educational historian and commentator; and those of Herbert Kliebard, considered one of the preeminent authorities on the development of the American curriculum. This investigation reveals that Ravitch’s longstanding condemnation of progressivism and curricular differentiation as the source of what ails public schools fails to account for the demise of the schoolteacher as the central force in early 21st-century schools—a factor that Kliebard identifies as crucial to understanding the nature of 21st-century schools. It is then suggested that recommitment to teachers as the educational center of gravity in public schools may provide new insight into understanding how school reform on the 21st century might move forward.
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 2010
During the late 1960s, a group of American curricularists and documentary filmmakers, notably Dwayne Huebner and Frederick Wiseman, worked to provoke the educational and political issues of their time. In turn, these public intellectuals sought to disrupt, among other things, the institutional borders and everyday realities of racialized segregation, infringements against individual rights, economic exploitation and gendered inequities within the institutions of schooling. The educational questions these filmmakers and curriculum theorists posed more than four decades ago continue to speak to things that matter. Many of these curricularists, like Maxine Greene, Michael Apple, Dwayne Huebner, and William F. Pinar to name a few provoked us to question why some administrators, teachers and students (including the authors of this writing) remain couched in our own indifference and accede ourselves to the political, silent extensions of bureaucratic and technocratic discursive arms. Are younger generations of politicians, curriculum scholars, principals, teachers and students taking account of our mediated consumption of things that matter? Are we questioning the underpinning causes and multiple literacies of our current environmental crisis, the ongoing racialized, homophobic, physical, psychical, misogynistic, exploitative and epistemic violence taking place inside and outside schools? Or, are we repeating the political and curricular bandwagon songs of the past? Are Iraq and Afghanistan, once again, yet another symbolic curricular recapitulation of Vietnam? Are schools designed to lead, inform and provoke society? Or, are schools merely created to reflect contemporary society’s beliefs, obsessions, preoccupations and frailties? Further, does curriculum mirror school’s focus or does curriculum work in opposition to what schools set out to achieve? In response to such pro/vocations we attempt to bridge a complicated conversation between two historical texts hoping, in turn, to relocate and re-enter the present temporal borders of our current lives beyond.... superficial curricular sighs.
Educational Theory, 2005
Marxist analyses of schooling assert that the public school curriculum is a product of a "selective tradition." In these accounts the knowledge included in and excluded from the curriculum represents a selected body of information and skills that is "connected" to the reproduction of class domination. Those who outline this connection between curricula and capitalism generally assert the presence of a functional relationship. The curriculum is constrained by the requirements of a capitalist society. While several studies have critically examined the schools' curricula, these analyses have not adequately connected the presence or absence of curricular topics to capitalism.' The connection to the logic of Capital is asserted but not substantiated. Without an indication of how this functional relationship is maintained, we are left with an interesting thesis but without an adequate appraisal of whether or not this functional nexus actually exists. These assertions must now become the object of disciplined examination. This essay will not attempt to prove that the curricula-capitalism connection exists. It will, however, provide a conceptual and methodological framework whereby these crucial assertions can either be adequately substantiated, qualified, or discarded. There are two interrelated claims contained within the analyses of the selective tradition. First, there is the assertion that a functional relationship exists between the schools and capitalism. The curriculum is functional for the maintenance and progress of capitalism. However, this functional relationship is of a peculiar type. The second claim is that elements in a curriculum that would obstruct a capitalist mode of production are identified as being dysfunctional to capitalism and therefore excluded from the public school curriculum. The assertion that the curriculum represents a systematic elimination of curricular topics entails a very specific judgment: what is excluded from the curriculum is just as important as, if not more important than, what is included. Any attempt to substantiate these assertions confronts particular difficulties. Conceptual problems are posed by the task'of identifying how this selection occurs and how it is connected to the logic of Capital, and methodological dilemmas are encountered by
The Hidden Curriculum and the Good Citizen
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into this new century of the American republic, the characteristics desired in the citizen have reflected distinct eras in late American history. Schools were not necessarily explicit in instilling these characteristics; in many ways, they were part of the hidden curriculum of schooling. These eras, which stretch from the immediate postwar nation through the civil rights movement and the Great Society to the present era of the standards and accountability movement, are time of increased federal involvement in schools, national concern over potential foreign and domestic threats, and a push for equality in schooling that was not always successful. Schools, however, were not isolated incubators of liberty and Deweyan conceptions of good citizenship. Instead, they were reflective of and responsive to the pressures of American society. This essay will argue that the hidden civic curriculum that was a strong component of schooling rejected the Deweyan notion of democratic participation and was not a product created by the school itself. Rather, this paper will show that societal factors shaped the hidden curriculum of schools and established characteristics of ‘good citizenship’ that were intended primarily to maintain social stability and secure American economic prosperity and military-political security in both the foreign and domestic arenas while providing a semi-illusory sense of democratic participation through controlled social change.
Hidden Curriculum and the Need for Critical Pedagogy
2017
This paper argues that schools serve as agents in the reproduction of dominant social structures and in this process it is the hidden curriculum, which plays a more significant role than the formal curriculum. The paper also illustrates that learners do have an agency and carve out their own means of dealing with the different kinds of oppression that they come across in classrooms and schools. Given the impact of the hidden curriculum, the paper argues that there is a need for adopting a critical pedagogic approach and using discursive practices in the classroom to equip the learners with the knowledge to understand the various forms in which domination happens and the necessary skills to effectively face the challenges of the hidden curriculum.