Hiding the Hidden Curriculum: An Interpretation of the Language of Justification in Nineteenth- Century Educational Reform.

Abstract

There is a curious discontinuity in the history of educational rhetoric, one that to my knowledge has not yet been seriously explored. The discontinuity appears toward the beginning of the twentieth century as a sudden shift in the ways that school people and others have justified public schooling in America. Exploring this shift may shed considerable light on a current issue in education, the issue of the schools' curriculum. Recently we have witnessed the discovery-or, rather, we have heard the allegation, for the issue is cast most often as criticism-that schools are teaching more than they claim to teach, that they are doing it systematically, and doing it well. A pervasive hidden curriculum has been discovered in operation. The functions of this hidden curriculum have been variously identified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility, the perpetuation of traditional class structurefunctions that may be characterized generally as social control. Critics allege that, although this function of social control is not acknowledged openly, it is performed nevertheless, perhaps more effectively than the deliberate teaching of intellectual content and skill, the function in whose name we explicitly justify schooling. But if social control is now called a hidden function of the school, it cannot be called an unfamiliar one. Even the recent literature of discovery and exploration (e.g., Overly, 1970) conveys no astonishment at what it has found. The functions of the hidden curriculum are performed openly, sometimes by the most mundane and venerable practices of the schools. If these practices constitute a hidden curriculum, it is hidden only in the sense that the function of social control goes unacknowledged in current rationales for public education. The schools' social control function has been hidden from the language of justification. Indeed, it has vanished from that language, for much that is today called a hidden function of the schools was previously held to be among the prime benefits of schooling.