Blackwell Reference Online

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The hidden curriculum refers to the unofficial rules, routines, and structures of schools through which students learn behaviors, values, beliefs, and attitudes. Elements of the hidden curriculum do not appear in schools” written goals, formal lesson plans, or learning objectives although they may reflect culturally dominant social values and ideas about what schools should teach. Of the three major approaches to the hidden curriculum, the functionalist orientation is most concerned with how hidden curricula reproduce unified societies, the conflict perspective focuses on the reproduction of stratified societies, and symbolic interactionism more fully incorporates interactional context to our understanding of the hidden curriculum. Because of its focus on education as a tool in maintaining orderly societies and producing appropriately socialized individuals, functionalist works are often collected under the label of consensus theory. Consensus theory depicts schools as benign institutions that rationally sort and order individuals in order to fill high and low status positions, meeting society's need for both experts and low-skilled workers. As a concept, the hidden curriculum has its roots in Emile Durkheim's Education and Sociology (1922) and Moral Education (1925). Durkheim concluded that society could not function without a high degree of homogeneity and that education, ... log in or subscribe to read full text