Toward a New Hidden Curriculum
More than thirty years ago, Philip Jackson observed that schools have a “hidden curriculum” designed to prepare students for productive life.[1] At the time, most workers were expected to show up on time, do what they were told, and leave the thinking, problem solving, and creativity to a small leadership group. Armies functioned similarly, with a small class of officers doing the thinking for and commanding the actions of enlisted soldiers. And, indeed, schools were often seen as functioning best when they were like factories, taking in all manner of students and churning out a uniform product. Jackson noted that schools were microcosms of business and factory work environments in which students practiced following directions, working hard enough to keep the boss (teacher) satisfied, and not proposing alternatives to the tasks set by the teacher. One indicator of this hidden curriculum, Jackson observed, was the reality that school grades partly reflected whether the student worked hard enough, rather than simply indicating what each student had learned.
While many schools are working at changing this hidden curriculum, it has remarkable stability, especially in large public-school systems serving increasingly a body of students from less privileged families. Parents are used to it from their own school days. They want their students to be treated fairly, which gets interpreted as getting good grades if they follow orders, are docile, and work hard, regardless of the learning outcomes of such obedience. Yes, parents do hope that their kids learn to read and do math, and teachers want that, too. But, the first requirement of many schools remains fairness within the traditional hidden curriculum, even as we wonder why schools show little improvement in the proportion of students who master the set subject-matter curriculum.
This all reflects an old understanding of schooling that was true for a long time. Until recently, the world changed slowly most of the time. Before Gutenberg, books were extremely rare. What one needed to know was relatively static, and knowledge could be conveyed by lectures. Indeed, an early academic rank was “reader,” someone who would, in essence, read out what was in the rare book that students could not afford. Lectures worked a bit better then because a static world became enculturated — the books could refer to experiences that everyone had undergone. Following directions was a sensible part of the hidden curriculum because the small-scale entities that employed people knew what they wanted done and could tell their workers to do it. Compliance was the critical virtue.
Today’s world is quite different. We live in an “exponential age,”[3] creating challenges for schools that stick to the traditional hidden curriculum. Many schools know this, but often parents pressure them to provide the education that worked for the previous generation and to do it the way it was done before. After all, everyone experienced schooling, so everyone thinks they are an expert on what is needed. Also, generations of life in which there was need for many order followers and only a few hard thinkers produced ideas about schooling that perseverate. Further, given the current cost of professional talent, moving beyond the world of the teacher as “reader” is difficult within current school budgets and given how most teachers were trained.
So, what should the hidden curriculum be today, and how can schools provide it to all their students? Many schools serving more privileged families have largely figured this out. School days in such schools are often project-oriented, with students working in teams on extended projects that require original thinking and team problem solving and action. The best of those projects mimic the character of modern work, just as the old hidden curriculum did for the middle of the previous century. That is, a team is assembled of people with differing skills, and they work together to address a novel problem. For example, a team might be asked to develop a project that helps some group of people contribute less carbon to the atmosphere, or even a project to help fellow students having trouble becoming good readers.
Within the “maker movement,”[4] one finds projects that leverage skills of the different participants, and not all are team efforts, but these still can be an important element of the new hidden curriculum, as is discussed below. I have seen projects in my region that included development of new video games, the making of a very artistic and functional guitar, and even some efforts at restorative justice in schools trying to reduce violence in their space. The possibilities are endless.
So, what are some characteristics of projects that might make them part of a new hidden curriculum? Here are a starting set of candidates for things a useful project might involve.
1. Entrepreneurial risk-taking
2. Persistence
3. Collaboration
4. Communication across different knowledge bases
5. Ethical decisions
6. Discipline in allocation of time, effort, and patience
Here are a few thoughts on each of these.
Entrepreneurial risk taking. The hidden curriculum of the 20th century involved full compliance with detailed and explicit instructions. Today, machines can do that, and people are valued because they can find and complete emergent tasks that bring new value to organizations, society, and sometimes individuals. Not every effort is a success in such searching for solutions to new problems. So, some projects in the new hidden curriculum need to involve risk-taking and situations in which even perfect student performance will not produce a success every time. Many students have found ways to do some of this on their own, for example through gaming. However, the problems that humans especially will be needed for in the future will generally require team efforts, where different people bring different perspectives to the joint effort. For this reason, individual gaming will not be enough, though some helpful projects may be organized as team games.
The issue of success and failure is perhaps a bit more complex, since there are some situations in life where it is critical to persist in the face of failure. Sometimes an organization needs something badly, and its members need to keep trying, learning from failures but persisting to try again. At the same time, there are other situations when the appropriate response is to acknowledge that the effort was worthwhile, but it is time to do something else. As Kenny Rogers’ song tells us, “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” This should be something practiced within the hidden curriculum of schooling, not for gambling but for participation in challenging group activities.
Persistence. While there are times to give up, schools in general fail to teach every student to persist in difficult activity, something often essential to success.[5] Students partly can be told the value of persistence, but it often is necessary to practice persisting, since it can be easy to walk away when things get hard. In the 20th century hidden curriculum, students were taught to follow instructions about when to persist. In the hidden curriculum for the exponential age, student need to be good at deciding this themselves. A variety of activities can support acquiring persistence, including musical groups that reinforce practice, sports, games, science competitions, and other such activities. It is hard to get reliable and secure measures of the ability to persist in developing new capabilities, but there is at least some evidence that the best available measures of such dispositions add to the predictive power of grades and test scores in predicting college success.[6] It is a good bet that practice at persistence also predicts later life successes.
Collaboration. Machines now do quite well at applying a fixed body of knowledge, and they are starting to do well at learning from collections of past human performances and from large bodies of data. A space currently left to humans and to combinations of humans and machines is the tackling of emergent problems that require the combined use of different expertises. For example, decisions in a hospital might involve medical knowledge about what treatments are best, business knowledge about what level of resources can be sustained, psychological knowledge about both what patients can be induced to do and about how hospital staff will perform under various constraints, and other expertise as well. It is seldom the case that one person has all this competence, and the blending of these different knowledge sources often works better if each is “championed” by a different person. Another example is the worker participation in company improvement discussed by Lia DiBello in an earlier blog on this site.[7] She describes how her group provided workers in a foundry with an overview (actually, a simulation) of how the business worked that then allowed the different kinds of skilled workers jointly to design improvements to the plant’s operations that ended up making the about-to-fail company quite viable. While it is possible to help workers learn to collaborate, businesses will, when they can, prefer to hire those with prior experience being effective team players. Practicing team problem solving and team production of products (games, reports, posters, etc.) should be part of the new hidden curriculum.
Communication across differing perspectives. Much of what goes best when done by practiced humans rather than machines involves communication among people with different ontological bases for what they know and say. For example, many problems that arise in the health insurance world involve points of view of patients, insurance companies, medical staff, and sometimes public health professionals. Telling a customer why a claim was refused requires translating from one experiential base to another. For example, the patient may feel that if their doctor called for a procedure, it should be covered, while an expert in that procedure might disagree that it is the best option, or an insurer may feel that its efficacy has yet to be proven. Translating across these points of view is critical both in advocating for the patient and in explaining decisions that the patient may not want to accept.
And, of course, in the space of politics and public policy, there also are such cross-ontology issues. For example, a parent or a teacher may feel that schools should have zero tolerance for misbehavior and suspend for even the slightest infraction, while advocates for minority communities whose children receive excessive numbers of suspensions may argue for alternative restorative justice approaches. There is data to settle this issue, in part, but even the acceptance of data requires understanding across ontological gaps. Again, practice at such explaining and understand is a worthwhile part of the hidden curriculum.
Ethical decision making. While its acceptance has dropped since the end of World War II, there remains within the hidden curriculum of the past a rather unbounded requirement that the directions of authorities always be followed. It remains difficult for people schooled in that past hidden curriculum to refuse orders they are generally expected to follow. The skills needed to do so must be practiced. They can and are practiced in the course of job training. For example, nurses in strong training programs are taught techniques for telling a resident physician that an ordered treatment might be a bad idea and should be discussed with an attending physician (my son, a nurse, has saved a few lives because he knows how to do this).
Beyond preventing operational mistakes, though, our political system and economy depend on people being ready to question unethical actions, even when there is substantial backlash by a person in authority. This is not easy. Ethical decision making is taught in professional schools, but often the key points at which a wrongful action can be stopped are among paraprofessional workers. They receive less training, and sometimes the training is insufficiently emphasized. For this reason, it would be good for the hidden curriculum to include practice in pushing back against unethical demands and actions. As with much that is important in life (like football 😊), coaching ethical behavior requires terse coaching at the time a situation arises followed by reflective discussion once the situation has been handled.[8] The hidden curriculum for the exponential age might be improved if teachers are trained in the coaching of group activity during situations when ethical problems arise. Simulations and gaming might easily provide opportunities for assuring that such situations do arise and thus can be coached and practiced.
Self-discipline in investing time, effort, and patience. One aspect of the old hidden curriculum needs to be retained, though perhaps adjusted. This is the disposition to work hard and to persist in practicing skills that likely will be frustratingly undeveloped at the outset. Quite a bit of recent work in educational psychology addresses this need, and methods for enhancing persistent effort are being developed.[9] While there is demonstrated efficacy, at least short-term, for short interventions, it is likely that persistence and engagement in learning as well as in team projects is partly a skill that must be developed with practice. The new hidden curriculum therefore needs to move from simply penalizing lack of persistence to coaching and shaping opportunities to practice persisting in the face of initial frustration and failure.
Afterword. There is much more to do in clarifying what the hidden curriculum for the exponential age should be, and the above is offered merely as a conversation starter. What is clear already is that many schools serving the children of the more privileged parts of our society are moving toward such a hidden curriculum while many schools serving the less privileged are persisting in the hidden curriculum Jackson described. Equity in education requires our efforts to change that. All children deserve schooling that prepares them for productive life; that is what the hidden curriculum always has been about.
[1] Jackson, P. W. (1990). Life in classrooms. Teachers College Press. See also https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/schools-as-factories-metaphors-that-stick/
[2] Downloaded from https://www.slideshare.net/suequirante/differentiated-instruction-76631616 under a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial License.
[3] Azhar, A. (2021). The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society. Diversion Books.
[4] Dougherty, D. (2012). The maker movement. Innovations: Technology, governance, globalization, 7(3), 11–14.
[5] See, for example, Lin-Siegler, X., Ahn, J. N., Chen, J., Fang, F. F. A., & Luna-Lucero, M. (2016). Even Einstein struggled: Effects of learning about great scientists’ struggles on high school students’ motivation to learn science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 314.
[6] Willingham, W. W. (1985). Success in college: The role of personal qualities and academic ability. College Board Publications, Box 886, New York, NY 10101.
[7] https://medium.com/about-work/the-midwest-foundry-an-example-of-employees-taking-control-in-a-crisis-by-re-inventing-the-90643592573b
[8] Katz, S., & O’Donnell, G. (1999, December). The cognitive skill of coaching collaboration. In Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning (pp. 36-es). Katz, S., O’Donnell, G., & Kay, H. (2000). An approach to analyzing the role and structure of reflective dialogue. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED), 11, 320–343.
[9] See Lin-Siegler, Xiaodong; Dweck, Carol S; Cohen, Geoffrey L. (2016). Journal of Educational Psychology, 108, (3), 295–299, and the articles in the same journal issue that it references. See also the work of the Xiaodong Lin-Siegler and her Education for Persistence and Innovation Center (https://epic.tc.columbia.edu/).
