Hidden Curriculum Essay

Cheap Custom Writing Service

This Hidden Curriculum Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The term 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 with our understanding of the hidden curriculum.

Some scholars posit that the hidden curricula carry powerful class-based and race-based messages. Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Berstein, for example, suggest that schools also create social environments that better match with the class backgrounds of middle and upper class students. Through the hidden curriculum, students get the message that middle and upper class cultural values, norms, and attitudes are the standard by which all else is measured. Schools reward conformity to these cultural norms and certify certain methods of learning as the standard. These learning methods are likely to better match middle and upper class styles of interaction and penalize lower- or working-class students.

Bibliography:

  • Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.

See also:

ORDER HIGH QUALITY CUSTOM PAPER


Always on-time

Plagiarism-Free

100% Confidentiality

Special offer!

GET 10% OFF WITH 24START DISCOUNT CODE