Studying Hidden Curricula: developing a perspective in the light of postmodern insights

This article provides an overview of research into the hidden curriculum. Following a consideration of functionalist, liberal and critical research studies, I focus in particular on recent insights which have arisen from postmodern thinking. In the light of postmodernism, I identify a personal perspective on how to study the hidden curriculum which moves beyond the established boundaries of discrete research paradigms. Why study the hidden curriculum? Had it not fulfilled all of its usefulness and potential by 1978, when David Hargreaves begged the question: “From whom, one wonders, is the hidden curriculum now hidden?” (Hargreaves, 1978, p. 97). In answer to these questions, I want to argue that it may be timely to revisit the concept for two main reasons. Firstly, although the initial wave of critical research into the hidden curriculum may have achieved its primary purpose of revealing covert political interference into the curriculum, the task of enabling people to understand what motivates such interference is perhaps even more important in the current context where political control over the curriculum is explicit yet offered up as ‘common sense’. Secondly, contemporary hidden curriculum research may seek to problematise the implicit and taken-for-granted rationality of most ‘modern’ curricula and the totality and coherence of the belief systems which inform them. Do current conceptions of curricula prepare students for the millennium? Do they reflect and anticipate the challenge of living in a world which is rapidly changing and becoming ever more complex, fragmented and uncertain? In short, then, contemporary hidden curriculum study might usefully embrace old and new challenges and, in so doing, might seek to draw on the wide range of analytical frameworks that have been applied to the study of education. What follows is a review of different research perspectives on the hidden curriculum. A concise summary of initial work into the hidden curriculum is presented for those unfamiliar with the field, since this work still has much to offer HIDDEN CURRICULA 177 Curriculum Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997