A Practical Hidden Curriculum Definition For Healthy Schools

Is your hidden curriculum definition practical or ideological?

As I have written in my books, the hidden curriculum is where brains interact with policies to create limitations on what can happen in classrooms. 

Most folks define the hidden curriculum in terms of inequities created by various forms of oppression, which tends to be more of an ideological stance rather than a practical one.

In any case, I have not found those discussions to be sufficiently precise for my purposes (except for a recent theory of injustice proposed by Michael Dover). 

Though true, my way of explaining it above also fails to give you a practical grasp of how to analyze the situation in which you are currently embedded for hidden curriculum influences.

So let’s think about my hidden curriculum definition in a different way that can help you, in a practical way, illuminate your current situation.

And later I will restate my definition in a practical way that can enable us to objectively evaluate the hidden curricula of schools.  

Analyzing the Hidden Curriculum

Let’s imagine the arrangement of a mainstream school. 

First, you enter the school gate on your way to the classroom door. 

When classes are over you will exit the classroom and make your way back out through the school gate. 

The school gate is the boundary with the outside world.

The threshold of the classroom door is the boundary between the realm that an individual teacher controls and the rest of the school community. 

When we talk about schools we tend to assume the mainstream arrangement and ignore everything that happens outside the classroom and outside that one-to-one teacher-student relationship.

Some important things are hidden by that ignorance. 

The hidden curriculum determines what is most likely to happen within the confines of the school gate. 


The hallways in the mainstream schools that I attended as a child had seemingly arbitrary rules about being in them, to take a literal example of a space between the school gate and the classroom door.

During class time students were not allowed to be there without proper authorization.

In most mainstream schools you have to possess a special token that proves that you are authorized to be in the hallways during class. 

There are, no doubt, reasons for those rules, but when those decisions are made in the bowels of a bureaucracy the agency of students and teachers are left to atrophy.

That is the exact opposite of what needs to happen in an educative environment.

If you are not yet familiar with my idea of Agentic Schools and how I distinguish educative from non-educative experiences I suggest that you learn about them by watching my video about how to rescue educational standardization from the junk pile of school critiques. 

The essence of doing a practical analysis of the hidden curriculum requires us to ask some questions about decisions and conflicts. 

The simplest way to analyze the hidden curriculum is to examine how decisions are made and how the conflicts get resolved (or not).


Take a look at your school.

Choose a feature of the school that you think can be improved.  

How were the decisions made that established the current pattern of behavior around that feature?

Who made the decisions?

Assuming the decisions were not made by the students and/or teachers, why not?

Why is it better for the education of those students for someone other than those students and/or their teachers to make that decision?

Who can change those decisions, and how can they do it? 

If the change process is not accessible to students and/or teachers, how is that lack of access justified in light of the necessity of exercising agency as a fundamental educative process?

How can any conflicts that arise from that decision be resolved?

Do all members of the community have access to the same conflict resolution processes? 

Or, do some community members have access to special processes that don’t apply to everyone?

In my childhood schooling adults were the only people formally empowered to handle conflicts. 

Implicitly the adults were immune from being held accountable by children, unless they were willing to get their parents involved, which was regarded as an extreme move.

If there are special processes for some members, is access determined in a fair and impartial manner or in an arbitrary and capricious manner?


For instance, it is educationally necessary to enable young children or others with limited communication skills to have assistance to access conflict resolution processes. 

That assistance is provided by ombudspeople who are skilled communicators with training in facilitation. 

No one can fully exercise their agency unless they have access to effective conflict resolution processes, so providing easy universal access to ombudspeople is fair and impartial. 


On the other hand, enabling an adult who makes large donations to make a decision that cannot be challenged or changed by the community would invite the decision to be made on an individual whim rather than according to what is needed by the community. 

Having completely separate decision making processes for adults and children seems arbitrary and capricious to me (except for specific issues that are covered by law).


A more thorough analysis of the hidden curriculum would touch on decisions that determine schedules, calendars, legally binding contracts, and any restrictions imposed by local, state, and federal laws. 

Decisions made in the past by folks now absent from the situation should be revisited for their potential educational value as exercises of agency by students and teachers. 

Alternative Hidden Curricula

In Agentic Schools, like the two schools I studied for my thesis research, they manage that space between the school gate and the classroom door in fundamentally different ways. 

Both of the schools I studied managed it in a way that was different from the mainstream and different from each other. 

When we consider the Village Free School, and similar democratic schools, it helps to be clear that the classroom represents formal studies, or coursework supervised by a teacher.

In democratic schools the “classroom” in this sense is an optional resource, not a required one like in the mainstream.

That means that what they offer as a school institution is a “curriculum” of decision making and conflict resolution, not formal coursework. 

Curriculum in this sense is what everyone is required to do. 

That is their curriculum because those are the only things that everyone is required to participate in as members of those communities. 

Besides doing things that will get you kicked out of all schools no matter how they are organized, such as breaking the law, hurting people, or destroying the school’s assets, the only guaranteed ways to get kicked out of democratic schools is to refuse to participate in their democratic decision making and conflict resolution processes. 


The other school I studied was called the Village Home Education Resource Center.

It operates like what we in the USA call a community college.

They have a large slate of classes on offer and students get to pick and choose almost anything they want. 

The school does not enforce any academic requirements.  

Village Home does not take responsibility for children until they cross the threshold of the classroom door.

The transition from the school gate to the classroom door is managed by having the families continue to be responsible for their children during that transit. 

It is similar to how parents all take responsibility for their children in other public spaces such as playgrounds, parks, restaurants, etc. 

Village Home’s campuses have a significant proportion of non-classroom spaces that are comfortable for families to spend time in; sometimes up to a third of their total space.

That is because the logistics of managing siblings and friends sometimes requires folks to wait  around while classes are in session. 

Notably, they do not have any system of “authorizing” folks to use their hallways, like in my mainstream school experiences. 

Everyone is free to use the hallways and lounges according to their whims (but remember that all children are expected to be supervised, just not by school personnel).

I asked about conflict resolution and the executive director told me that they would naturally take responsibility if an issue came up, but in decades of operation it has never come up. 


What is the social structure that facilitates the journey from the school gate to the classroom door? 

In mainstream schools, it’s characterized by arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with meeting learning needs but everything to do with bureaucratic control and reducing liability.   

In the Village Home context, the space between them is functionally collapsed because the family just continues to be responsible until the child crosses the threshold of the classroom door. 

At the Village Free School the space between them is also functionally collapsed because formal studies or coursework are optional and never crossing the threshold of the classroom door is a possibility, so their curriculum is not confined to that space. 

The school imposes a curriculum of decision making and conflict resolution which means that the education they provide occurs independent of whether or not formal studies are ever involved. 


Agentic Schools are creative about how they provide education, they are not limited by formal instruction. 

Their entire curriculum is hidden in the sense that it is not being delivered by the mechanism of formal instruction. 

Hidden Curriculum Definition Revisited

Schools that want to be clear about how their hidden curriculum works need to get clear about how decisions are made and conflicts resolved.

They need to put the primary human needs of their community members at the center of their social structures; this is the best way to facilitate the expression of agency by their students and teachers. 

That will require schools that are more mainstream to question the rules that currently shape the behaviors that occur in the space between the school gate and the classroom door. 

They will also need  figure out how to change some of those patterns in response to the human needs of their community.


My hidden curriculum definition is not predicated on observations of oppression. 

The hidden curriculum is a natural consequence of having complex organizations that have policies that exist independent of each individual brain that makes up that organization. 

Each brain interacts with the policies of the organization through behaving in certain patterns and engaging in certain types of discourse about the organization and their role in it. 

Recall that my original hidden curriculum definition is how brains interact with policies to create limitations on what can happen in a school. 

To be clear when I refer to “policy” here I mean it in a broad sense that includes both implicit (unstated) and explicit forms. 

My hidden curriculum definition is based primarily on my understanding of Self-Determination Theory, and related constructs, which means that it explains both oppression and liberation from oppression in clear and specific terms. 

This also means that schools can be evaluated for how well their policies lead to liberatory experiences for their students and teachers. 


To be more precise about the practical side of my hidden curriculum definition: schools have a vitalizing (liberatory) hidden curriculum when students and teachers participate in activities in which their primary psychological needs are usually satisfied, their motivations are more autonomous than controlled, and their engagement is usually agentic, not merely behavioral.

Schools have a toxic (oppressive) hidden curriculum when students and teachers participate in activities in which their primary psychological needs are usually thwarted or neglected, their motivations are more controlled than autonomous, and their engagement is merely behavioral and not usually agentic.

Demographic characteristics are irrelevant, though highly skewed proportions in demographic data might suggest that a particular situation should be further examined to ensure that the hidden curriculum that causes that skew is vitalizing, not toxic. 

Schools can be evaluated objectively, not ideologically, using this clear and practical hidden curriculum definition. 

This article was printed from HolisticEquity.com

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