The Hidden Curriculum

The Hidden Curriculum theory states that a large part of a student's education is learned inadvertently, that students, unconsciously and unwittingly, acquire many habits, practices, and dispositions in ways that had little to do with the curriculum design. 


It's important to evaluate one's education, then, by looking at much more than what's on the curriculum. An education is also defined by the effects the learning environment has on one's work ethic, vision of success, feelings of self-worth, and day-to-day habits. That's institutional design, incetive structures, and the cultural traditions we preserve and expand upon are so important.


KIPP schools, as Brooks notes in this column, have codified skills and habits that are typically developed involuntarily, those typically part of a hidden curriculum:

"In short, KIPP is taking skills that middle-class kids pick up unconsciously and it is rigorously drilling them into students from less fortunate backgrounds. KIPP Academies, like many of the best schools these days, don’t just cram information into brains. They educate the elephant. They surround students with a total environment, a holistic set of habits and messages, and they dominate students’ lives for many hours a day."

We used to think that the best way to foster hard-working, confident, and judicious students was to leave them be -- to let them grow "naturally". We, Brooks argues, were severely mistaken.

"A generation ago, the gods of education fashion ordained that children should be liberated from desks-in-a-row pedagogy to follow their “natural” inclinations. In those days, human beings were commonly divided between their natural selves, assumed to be free and wonderful, and their socially constructed selves, assumed to be inhibited and repressed.

"But now, thanks to bitter experience and scientific research, we know that the best environments don’t liberate students. We know, or have rediscovered, that the most nurturing environments are highly structured. Children flourish in homes that are organized, in families where attachments are stable, among people who plan for the future and within cultures that celebrate work."