The Hidden Curriculum

"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor."

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

It is a fascinating phenomenon within school education although on the surface it appears to be about teaching skills to people but it is more about the undercurrent of making people conform to a way of thinking. I have always been fascinated about the history of teaching and education and historically the state did not want people to know what was going on, that is why education was restricted first of all to the rich and ruling classes and only to the males. The timing of when education expanded to include the less noble classes firstly the middle classes and then the lower classes and then also to include women is a thing that fascinates me the most.

This tells us a lot about what education does because the drive to get the poor into schools was partly driven by the industrial revolution but mostly driven by what the Germans  and the French were doing. As the Germans got all of their working classes into schools we started to follow suit. This goes to show a cynical aspect that it is not really about educating people but about training and keeping up with the competition.

Today what passes as education is box ticking of things set by government and looks less and less about the old idea of opening the mind but more like binding it to the doctrine of the government think tanks. I liken it  to considering the education system as some form of thinking entity that overpowers the good intentions of teachers and even  pupils. The biggest damage that is caused by the education system is exactly what is implied in the above quotation, this idea of limitation, conformity and restriction. It is like the whole system has cast a spell over people making them feel that they cannot go against what they are being told as if it is some sort of rulebook on how to live your life and how to think. I am not sure whether we are going to get to the point like the emperor’s new clothes where we see things as they are and are able to change. It is quite likely that the system will change because it will fall apart at some point.

That falling apart may happen sooner than we imagine and it might hit independent schools first because of the rising costs incurred and charged by them. I have written about this before but there is an interesting similarity historically to the rise of the internal combustion engine, that when cars were being produced in great numbers the skills of the leather maker, the production of saddles the breeding of working horses many other skills related to the old transport system became obsolete. In reflection we can look at that and say why didn’t they see it coming. This could well be the situation in the education system at the moment. in the near future people will be taught at home or in some sort of electronic cottage which does not require teachers or staff just somebody to mind the kids and to some extent. in the US that’s already happening and in the UK if you speak to teachers much of their time is taken up in social administration and not education.

We should be able to see this coming, a change that will seem so obvious in the future but not clear to us at the moment, everything is there in place, everybody can be taught online now I do not necessary think this is a good idea because this is more of the same, the only to get out would be home educate your children.

So let’s take this back to the creative musician and teacher, what does that means for us?  The psychological benefits of learning a musical instrument may attract the type of people and parents who see that this is a way of developing thinking in their children and themselves and maybe that is our salvation, maybe the above quotation is an expression of the problems with the system generally and that we are beginning to see how much of a house of cards modernity appears to be.

Vic

www.bluescamp.uk.co.uk

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