Hidden Curriculum
The implicit values, norms, behaviours, and worldviews that schooling transmits alongside its official content. Term coined by Philip W. Jackson in Life in Classrooms (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968) on the basis of ethnographic observation in U.S. elementary classrooms.
Origin
Jackson noticed that classroom life systematically taught children to wait, queue, accept evaluation, work in crowds, and submit to power asymmetries between teacher and pupil. None of this appeared in any syllabus, yet learners had to master it to succeed. He labelled this the hidden curriculum and argued that mastery of its three R's, "rules, regulations, and routines", often mattered more for school success than the official subject matter.
Theoretical Development
Subsequent writers extended the concept far beyond classroom routines. Bowles and Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books, 1976) argued the hidden curriculum reproduces class hierarchies by training different student populations into different forms of compliance. Michael Apple's Ideology and Curriculum (Routledge, 1979) examined how textbooks naturalise particular ideological positions while presenting them as neutral knowledge. Henry Giroux refined the term by distinguishing intentional ideological transmission from unintended structural effects. The concept is now standard across critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and curriculum studies.
Relevance to ELT
Language teaching transmits a heavy hidden curriculum because its materials, methods, and teacher assumptions all encode cultural choices.
- Native-speakerism: Adrian Holliday's work (ELT Journal, 2006) traces how ELT materials and training privilege idealised "native-speaker" varieties, methods, and teacher identities while positioning learners and non-native teachers as deficient.
- Coursebook representations: studies of global coursebooks document under-representation of women in professional roles, narrow racial and geographic diversity, and uniformly middle-class consumer settings. These choices teach learners who counts as a default English user.
- Cultural content: which festivals, foods, names, and family structures appear as unmarked teaches learners which cultural patterns the language belongs to.
- Classroom discourse: turn-taking norms, error-correction practices, and acceptable silences all carry pedagogical ideologies that may clash with learners' prior schooling.
Materials Evaluation frameworks since the 1990s, including Brian Tomlinson's, ask reviewers to surface such implicit content rather than treat it as neutral.
Distinctions
The hidden curriculum names what is taught implicitly. The Null Curriculum names what is not taught at all. The Enacted vs Intended Curriculum distinction concerns gaps between policy and practice rather than between explicit and tacit content. All three are analytic lenses on the same complex object.
References
- Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in Classrooms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
- Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. Basic Books.
- Apple, M. W. (1979). Ideology and Curriculum. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Holliday, A. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–387.
- Gray, J. (2010). The Construction of English: Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook. Palgrave Macmillan.