The hidden curriculum, first described by Philip Jackson (1968), is a set of unspoken or implicit rules and values that students learn while attending school. It is often contrasted with the more formalized, official curriculum that is spelled out in a school’s mission statement or lesson plans.
Philip W. Jackson coined the term ‘hidden curriculum’ in 1968 in his book Life in Classrooms, discussing the students’ need to master their schools’ expectations. He contended that education is a process of secondary socialization.
Key Takeaways
- Origins: Philip Jackson (1968) coined the term for the unspoken rules and values students learn just by attending school.
- Three Readings: functionalists see it as socialization into shared values, Marxists as preparation for workplace hierarchy, and feminists as a producer of gender inequality.
- Correspondence Principle: Bowles and Gintis (1976) argued school life is organized to mirror the capitalist workplace, preparing pupils for their future position in it.
- Gender Bias: Sadker and Sadker’s (1994) classroom research found teachers give boys more instructional attention than girls, often unconsciously.
- Modern Evidence: Carlana (2019) found teachers’ implicit, not just explicit, gender stereotypes widen the maths gender gap.
- Resistance: Willis’s (1981) study of working-class boys shows students can notice and resist the hidden curriculum, not just absorb it.
Hidden Curriculum Examples
Uniform
A school that has a strict dress code may be sending the message that appearance and conformity are more important than individuality and self-expression.
A dress code is rarely gender-neutral in practice. A rule that requires girls, but not boys, to wear a skirt or dress has consequences beyond appearance.
The clothing itself constrains how freely a girl can sit, move, or join in the physical play more freely available to boys in the same uniformed school.
Gender Inequality (Feminist View)
Education is thought to be an agent of socialization into gender-appropriate behavior, contributing to a wider patriarchal system (Sultana, 2010).
Subject-Choice Steering
Girls may be socialized into thinking that subjects like mathematics and science suit boys better. Feminists view the hidden curriculum as a producer of gender socialization that disfavors women in exactly these subjects.
Differential Teacher Interaction
Teachers may respond differently to boys and girls. From kindergarten onward, they may use gendered language, separate pupils for activities, and pit them against each other in competing teams (Sadker & Sadker, 1994).
Aim: Sadker and Sadker (1994) set out to document, systematically rather than anecdotally, whether teachers treat boy and girl pupils differently in ordinary classroom teaching.
Method: trained observers coded classroom interaction across many American schools. They recorded who teachers called on, how pupils were praised or criticized, and how this varied by sex.
Results: boys received substantially more instructional attention than girls. They were more often called on, given substantive follow-up questions rather than simple praise, and given precise academic criticism rather than vague encouragement. Boys, being more disruptive, drew more attention too.
Conclusion: Sadker and Sadker (1994) concluded that American schools were systematically shortchanging girls of instructional attention. This was a largely unconscious pattern of everyday teacher behavior, invisible to any inspection of the formal curriculum.
Status, Resourcing, and Textbooks
Boys and girls earn status differently.
Boys attain status through athletic ability, toughness, and cross-gender relationships, while girls gain popularity through social skills, appearance, and family socioeconomic background. School sports funding widens this gap further.
Teachers’ own assumptions about gendered aptitude in science and math are thought to shape their teaching approach, and in turn, pupils’ interest and performance in those subjects.
Heaton and Lawson (1996) argue that textbooks subtly promote gender stereotypes, especially through how men and women are portrayed in different roles. Sport and physical education follow the same pattern. Many educators, they add, still hold entrenched views about which tasks suit which gender.
Leadership Role Models
Even where female teachers outnumber male teachers, as in Wales and England, senior school and college management contains more men than women. This scarcity of senior female role models may damage female students’ sense of what leadership positions are realistically open to them.
The Radical Feminist Critique
Radical feminists go further, arguing the whole educational system remains patriarchal and continues to oppress and marginalize women structurally, not through correctable individual biases alone.
On this view, schooling promotes women’s dependency on men and leaves many girls uncomfortable studying certain subjects alongside boys. Gender inequalities persist, radical feminists argue, despite a national curriculum formally identical for both sexes.
Learn Norms and Values (Functionalist Approach)
The functionalist orientation toward the hidden curriculum is primarily concerned with concealed curricula’s reproduction of unified societies.
Closely associated with consensus theory, this approach focuses on the utilization of education to maintain order in society by appropriately socializing students.
Moreover, Emile Durkheim’s propositions in Education and Sociology (1922), as well as Moral Education (1925), likely foreshadowed the functionalist approach to the yet-undeveloped notion of the hidden curriculum.
Durkheim contended that the functioning of society required a high level of homogeneity, and this could be provided by education via highly regulated institutions.
The functionalists hold that the hidden curriculum imparts to children the following:
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The value of achievement: the hidden curriculum inculcates a strong work ethic, an attitude of inquiry, personal responsibility, individual initiative, a competitive spirit, and creativity.
This is amply evidenced by rewards reserved for students who procure high scores on examinations, praise bestowed on those who raise intelligent questions in class, and the recognition of original ideas in crafting and executing various projects.
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School as a microcosm: the school milieu constitutes a scaled-down encapsulation of the society at large in many respects, and thereby provides a training ground for entrance thereto.
The norms and values pervading the modern industrial society, consequently, permeate the socialization process which the hidden curriculum propagates. The expectation that pupils arrive by a certain time at school instructs them in punctuality which would be essential to preserving their jobs as adults.
Assenting to the school’s cultural norms and learning alongside pupils from different backgrounds, help pupils respect their fellow citizens’ opinions, and coexist with those different from oneself in the future.
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Rehearsal for bureaucratic and civic life: ordinary school procedures rehearse skills pupils will need as adults inside large institutions.
A fire drill teaches evacuation procedure. It also rehearses obedience to an unexplained instruction and cooperation under a chain of command, skills with an obvious connection to working inside any large institution as an adult.
Hall monitors, student council elections, and raising a hand to be called upon quietly model the same relationships. Employer and employee, official and citizen: pupils rehearse these roles years before they hold them.
History and civics courses do more than transmit facts. Because few societies teach unflattering accounts of their own past, such courses tend, in practice, to present a version of national history favoring the nation being taught in.
Social Class Inequality (Marxist View)
According to Marxists, the hidden curriculum reinforces social inequality and maintains ruling-class ideology. Education, on this view, teaches students to accept capitalist values without question.
Tracking is one mechanism. Schools that sort students into different ability levels or classes based on test scores can reinforce a damaging idea. Some students, the sorting implies, are inherently better, or less worth a teacher’s attention, than others.
This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy: students labeled “less capable” may come to believe it and underperform as a result (Jackson, 1968).
Grading is another. Schools breed competition among students through how grades are given and how teachers evaluate them. Through contests and races, students learn that society divides into winners and losers (Bowles & Gintis, 1976).
Bourdieu’s (1977) account of cultural capital extends this argument.
Education’s real function, on this reading, is to reproduce ruling-class culture and class inequality through the ideology a hidden curriculum transmits.
Noble and Davies (2009) find this reproduction continuing beyond secondary school. Working-class students, they show, are often reluctant to apply for university places because they believe they lack the cultural capital to fit in.
Jackson’s own account is older and more granular. Jackson (1964) described the hidden curriculum as the ‘unpublicised features of school life’ through which students learn to accept an unequal distribution of power within schools and society.
Jackson (1968) went further, describing the ordinary classroom as a site of persistent evaluation, physical crowding, and stark differences of power between ‘the managed and the manager.’
Classroom resources, such as a teacher’s attention and floor space, are inherently limited. Denial, delay, distraction and interruption follow.
The teacher, meanwhile, occupies several roles at once: gatekeeper of who may speak, supply sergeant rationing scarce materials, signaller of when participation is welcome, and granter of small privileges. The list is long.
In 1971, the psychiatrist and then-Dean of MIT’s Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder published a book called The Hidden Curriculum.
Snyder argued that unstated social and academic norms are primarily responsible for much of students’ anxiety and campus conflict.
He strove to ascertain why highly gifted students give up on education, and pointed out that these concealed norms impair the students’ capacity to think creatively and develop independently.
Correspondence Principle (Marxist View)
The Marxist approach to the hidden curriculum posed a substantial challenge to the functionalist view above. Schools, Marxist theorists argued, primarily serve the powerful.
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) gave this argument its most influential form. In their book Schooling in Capitalist America, they coined the term ‘long shadow of work’ for their central claim. Students develop a consciousness, internalize norms, and acquire skills suited to their future employment, they argued.
The claim was blunt. Schooling, on this view, prepares pupils for different levels of autonomy, control and ownership in the capitalist system.
Bowles and Gintis called this match the correspondence principle: the claim that the social relationships of schooling directly mirror, or “correspond to,” the social relationships of the capitalist workplace.
The parallel runs deep. School hierarchy corresponds to workplace hierarchy: the head teacher acts as a managing director, while uniformed, disciplined students take after lower-level employees under supervision.
Education, in short, teaches pupils how to navigate workplace relationships and prepares them practically for entering the labor market. Theories built on the correspondence principle are called reproduction theories, since they explain how education reproduces social inequality across generations.
Some parallels between the values taught at school and those used to exploit workers in the workplace include:
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The passive subservience of pupils to teachers, which corresponds to the passive subservience of workers to managers;
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An acceptance of hierarchy – the authority of teachers and administrators over students corresponding to the authority of managers over employees;
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Motivation by external rewards (such as grades over learning), which corresponds to workers being motivated by wages rather than the job of a job.
Critical Evaluation
Before exploring each critique in detail, here are the main criticisms raised against the theories above:
- Oversimplifying the Correspondence Principle: Lauder and Brown (1991) argue the Bowles-and-Gintis model no longer matches a workplace that has shifted toward teamwork, and Reynolds separately argues it neglects the formal curriculum.
- Resistance and Counter-School Culture: Willis’s (1981) ethnography shows working-class pupils actively rejecting, not simply absorbing, the hidden curriculum.
Oversimplifying the Correspondence Principle
Hugh Lauder and Philip Brown (1991) argue that Bowles and Gintis oversimplified education’s correspondence to the labor market.
Workplaces have changed. Bureaucratic control has diminished, they note, in favor of increased teamwork since the 1970s.
The correspondence principle’s core claim is that school hierarchy mirrors, and prepares pupils for, workplace hierarchy. That claim weakens if work now rewards collaboration rather than passive obedience.
Reynolds raised a different worry.
He argued that Bowles and Gintis discounted the impact of the formal curriculum: the officially stated subjects and skills a school sets out to teach.
Much of Britain’s curriculum, he argued, actually fails to impart the skills employers need.
The hidden curriculum may succeed brilliantly and still fail to make an ideal capitalist employee, Reynolds suggested, simply because its content is mismatched to real workplace demands.
Anyon’s (1980) evidence complicates this picture.
She found hidden-curriculum content itself varies by social class. That gives the correspondence principle a defence against Reynolds’s objection.
Even where the formal curriculum falls short, schools still teach different pupils to relate to knowledge and authority differently, exactly what the theory’s broader claims about class reproduction require.
Resistance and Counter-School Culture
Norms don’t guarantee compliance. Anti-school subcultures, truancy and exclusion suggest the hidden curriculum and the correspondence principle can both fail to secure the compliance they are said to produce.
Paul Willis studied this directly. His ethnography, Learning to Labor (1981), followed 12 working-class boys at Hammertown Boys, a school in the British Midlands.
Using ethnographic methods, he observed and interviewed them over roughly six months, with periodic follow-up until 1976.
Willis found something unexpected. The boys, in a nonconformist counter-school culture, recognised and rejected the school’s own account of success. Yet resistance didn’t mean escape: this same counterculture ultimately pushed them, as adults, into low-wage and subordinate labor positions.
Willis called this outcome a form of “self-damnation.” The boys’ own rebellion against school discipline, born from real insight into how the system worked, still delivered them into the very jobs the hidden curriculum had prepared them for.
Resistance, in other words, does not guarantee escape from the pattern the theory describes.
Contemporary Research
The feminist reading above has also been tested against newer evidence than the older observational literature could offer. The evidence is more mechanistic.
Aim: Carlana (2019) set out to establish whether teachers’ implicit gender stereotypes, rather than any consciously held belief, causally affect girls’ mathematics performance and their later school-track placement.
Method: Carlana measured implicit bias in 1,390 middle-school teachers across 102 schools in five Italian cities, using a Gender-Science Implicit Association Test. She linked these to students’ later school tracks.
Results: the maths gap between girls and boys widened substantially under teachers with stronger implicit gender stereotypes, while the same teachers’ stereotypes had no effect on literature results. Girls taught by more biased teachers lost confidence in their own ability and received less ambitious track recommendations.
Conclusion: Carlana (2019) concluded that implicit, not merely explicit, teacher stereotypes are a genuine causal channel behind gendered subject-choice patterns, operating through pupils’ own confidence.
A second, experimental study sharpens this mechanism further. Master, Cheryan, and Meltzoff (2016) tested whether a computer-science classroom’s décor alone, independent of anything a teacher says, communicates who belongs in the subject.
Method: across two experiments with 269 high-school-aged participants, pupils viewed a classroom furnished either with stereotypically “male-tech” objects or with neutral décor, then rated their interest in taking the course.
Results: girls, but not boys, reported markedly greater interest in computer science after viewing the non-stereotypical classroom. The same manipulation had no comparable effect on boys.
Conclusion: a subject’s hidden curriculum can be communicated by something as minimal as classroom décor, and this channel, unlike a teacher’s internal bias, can be changed directly.
What is the Formal Curriculum?
A conventional curriculum, also known as formal or academic curriculum, involves instruction and the transmission of knowledge in schools to accomplish the principal objectives of preparing students to pass examinations, and imparting to them specific skills.
These objectives, as well as their concomitant routines, structures and rules, are often communicated explicitly to parents and students by teachers and school administrators.
Everyday Signs of the Hidden Curriculum
The hidden curriculum works through the ordinary, informal texture of school life. It is usually a side-effect of routine, not a deliberate plan, but it still shapes what students value and how they behave, both inside and outside school (Jackson, 1968).
It shows up in small, everyday details: how teachers dress and behave, how they interact with students, how discipline is handled, and the overall climate of the school. A few common examples:
- Rules and Regulations: a school with many rules may signal that order and compliance matter more than creativity and innovation.
- Discipline Style: a school marked by violence or bullying may signal that aggression is more effective than cooperation and kindness.
References
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Durkheim, E. (1922). Education and Sociology. New York: Free Press.
Durkheim E. (1925). Moral education: A study in the theory and application of the sociology of education. New York and London: The Free Press and Collier-Macmillan.
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Noble, J., & Davies, P. (2009). Cultural capital as an explanation of variation in participation in higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30 (5), 591-605.
Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools shortchange girls. New York: Touchstone.
Snyder, Benson R. (1971). The Hidden Curriculum. Alfred A. Knopf.
Willis, P. (1981). Learning to Labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1977)
