Secret curriculum

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The term secret curriculum ( English hidden curriculum ) refers to a not officially provided school or university implicit transmitting teaching materials and shapes as well as effects on the socialization beyond curricula or school regulations. The secret curriculum can contradict, undermine, render ineffective or supplement the official curriculum .

origin

The expression was coined in the late 1960s and is a loan transfer of the English expression " hidden curriculum " by the cultural anthropologist Philip W. Jackson (Life In Classrooms, 1968). This “second curriculum” is a basic course in the social rules, regulations and routines in order to be able to make the way through the school without taking much damage .

The idea of ​​influences outside the intended curriculum can be found earlier in the literature. For example, as early as 1925 , the reform pedagogue and training analyst Siegfried Bernfeld criticized the school system as a place of education in which, despite the efforts of the pedagogues, secret forces are at work that extend far beyond the classroom.

research

Various approaches to explaining the secret curriculum have been developed to explain its role in school socialization. Henry Giroux and Anthony Penna distinguish between a structural-functionalist , a phenomenological and an educational-critical approach based on Marxism. The structural functionalist explains how the norms and values ​​of society are conveyed through the school, so that their necessity for the functioning of society is accepted without questioning. The phenomenological approach assumes that meaning is conveyed through social encounters and interaction. The critical approach highlights the connection between economic and cultural reproduction, as well as the relationships between theory, ideology and social practice of learning. According to Giroux and Penna, the first two approaches have contributed to the analysis of the hidden curriculum , but the critical approach offers deeper insights. The most important point is the realization that education in the form of the hidden curriculum is still shaped by aspects of the economic and social order.

Role in the university environment

In the Anglo-Saxon countries , it is emphasized that quality and experience in basic schooling, as well as social class , gender and race (which in the USA are still recorded as demographic classification) are more important in higher education . Likewise, early commitment to predetermined training paths (tracking) is socially determined and viewed as an important restriction on social mobility in the United States.

In an overview article on the university as a way of life in Rüdiger vom Bruch's book on the German university landscape , Matthias Stickler emphasizes the essential role of, literally, “driving student associations” as part of the secret curriculum. In the Anglo-Saxon world, personality development and habitus formation are also seen as part of the training in colleges and universities . The American fraternities and sororities are also closely committed to the university and are under its supervision. In contrast to the English-speaking colleges, however, Humboldt's concept of the university postponed such aspects of the education and habit formation of students outside the university. For this reason, this took place for a long time in German-speaking countries based on the model or within student associations and, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon region, was committed to youthful, mostly male self-education. The student customs and the associated rituals such as the occasional beer-loving stroll had very tangible backgrounds. Modern cultural studies and a closer look at connections in general are considered important and a significant research gap (status 2010).

Conversely, in Germany free access to universities has long been seen as an essential prerequisite for social mobility; The decisive prerequisite is - as has long been known in the Anglo-Saxon countries - the quality of early (pre) school education. This was confirmed, among other things, in connection with the PISA studies . The relationship between the previous education of the parents and the selected training is clearly higher in Germany than in other industrialized countries, including the USA. In the People's Republic of China , especially in Shanghai , the often-cited relationship between poverty and lack of access to school and university has now been almost completely decoupled.

Use in German educational science

Around 1970 the term secret curriculum was used in educational science primarily with a socially critical intention. From this point of view, schools bring about a social reproduction of social conditions; Students would be trained to function in the given social system. Like many institutions, the school has a dual character: it promises emancipation and enlightenment , but induces the pupils to adapt and thus stabilize the ruling "system" or hierarchies anchored in society .

Criticism of co-education

Recently, it has been increasingly pointed out that clandestine curricula can lead to or consolidate disadvantages, for example based on gender or origin. In the endeavors towards intercultural education, it is pointed out that Eurocentric teaching content disadvantages foreign students. Physics as well as mathematics educators try to identify and change the secret curriculum , which supposedly leads to girls losing their interest in physics within a few years of middle school. One possible cause is seen in the fact that, despite coeducational teaching, a traditional male perspective dominates the presentation and preparation of teaching topics.

precursor

As early as the 1950s, Talcott Parsons , the founder of sociological systems theory, stated that school is not just teaching, but also fulfills social functions , albeit with a completely uncritical intention. He spoke of the requirements of the selection of students for social roles and of socialization in the sense of internalizing role standards (see the essay The School Class as a Social System from 1955). In terms of the matter, Eduard Spranger drew attention to the facts as early as 1962 in his last book The Law of Unwanted Side Effects in Upbringing .

Students not only learn the content they are supposed to learn on purpose, but are also part of socialization processes like

  • non-teacher-controlled interactions in the study group,
  • Behavior in the peer group ,
  • the imitation of role models

and the like.

To cope with the school system , students learn strategies and tactics,

  • how to succeed with classmates or with the teacher,
  • how to hide ignorance,
  • how to avoid unpleasant work,
  • how to use less time felt as idle effectively for sideline activities

and similar.

So it works, according to Meyer

"[...] in the secret curriculum, about the silent mechanisms of practicing the rules and rituals of the institution; it's about getting used to above and below, to being good and bad, to being conspicuous and muddling through. To put it in the usual foreign words: it is about practicing hierarchical thinking, competition for performance and conformity to norms. "

- Meyer 1988, p. 65

Educational Effects of the Secret Curriculum

According to Gabriele Kandzora, the secret curriculum conveys the following effects:

  • The compulsory character of school learning influences the perception of the subject matter and the attitude towards it.
  • The hierarchy of the school organization shapes the self-perception of one's own learning process.
  • The personality is reduced emotionally and in action to the student role.
  • The learner becomes the object of the learning process.
  • Learning is based on external guidelines.
  • The learning adjusts to assessment and formal performance criteria.
  • Competitive behavior is practiced.
  • The adaptation to teacher expectations is conveyed.
  • The processes are bureaucratised.
  • The learners fit into the necessities of institutionally prescribed temporal and spatial structures, e.g. B. the 45-minute rhythm or the seating arrangement.
  • They practice rituals and forms of interaction that are not democratic and self-determined.

research results

Marianna Jäger researched everyday school life in first grade in a school ethnographic study. Already on the first day of school, numerous behavioral expectations were conveyed explicitly or implicitly, for example through the style of language, above all rules for maintaining discipline in the classroom, but also different expectations towards the sexes. The normative “ middle class code ” represents a “form of symbolic violence that disadvantages children from other social milieus and gives them the feeling that they are not up to the demands”. “Whether school structures, seating arrangements, textbooks or didactic arrangements and rituals, spontaneous comments from teachers or inconspicuous comments from peers: the secret curriculum plays a role everywhere. It should not be underestimated in terms of school socialization. "

literature

  • John Taylor Gatto : Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling , New Society Publishers, 2Rev. Ed. 2002, ISBN 0-86571-448-7
  • John Taylor Gatto: Dumb it up! Dumbing us down: The invisible curriculum or what children really learn in school , Genius Verlag, Bremen, 1st Ed. 2009, ISBN 393471935X
  • Klaus W. Döring : Teacher behavior . Weinheim 1989, p. 297 ff.
  • Hilbert Meyer : teaching methods . In: Theory volume . Frankfurt 1988, 2nd edition.
  • Talcott Parsons : The school class as a social system . In: ders., Social structure and personality , Eschborn 1964.
  • Jürgen Zinnecker: The secret curriculum . Weinheim 1975.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerd Reinhold: Pedagogical Lexicon . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 1999, ISBN 978-3-486-78522-7 ( google.de [accessed on February 22, 2017]).
  2. ↑ Philip W. Jackson: To the function of the social forms of communication in the classroom . In: Jürgen Zinnecker (Ed.): The secret curriculum . Beltz, Weinheim and Basel 1975, p. 29 .
  3. ^ Siegfried Bernfeld: Sisyphos or the limits of education , 4th edition Frankfurt a. M. 1981
  4. ^ Giroux, Henry and Anthony Penna: Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum. In: Giroux, Henry and David Purpel (Eds.): The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education . Berkeley, California: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1983. pp. 100-121.
  5. ^ Margolis, Eric, Michael Militärko, Sandra Acker, and Marina Gair. "Peekaboo: Hiding and Outing the Curriculum." The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education. Ed. Margolis, Eric. New York: Routledge, 2001.
  6. ^ Rosenbaum, James E. The Hidden Curriculum of High School Tracking. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
  7. ↑ a b c d The Berlin University in the context of the German university landscape after 1800, around 1860 and around 1910 Rüdiger vom Bruch Oldenbourg Verlag, July 7, 2010.
  8. ↑ Chris Cook: Shanghai tops global state school rankings. In: ft.com. Financial Times , December 7, 2010, accessed June 28, 2012 .
  9. ↑ Gabriele Kandzora: School as a socialized institution: Secret curriculum and political learning . In: The politicization of people (=  series: Political Psychology ). No. 2 . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1996, ISBN 978-3-322-97273-6 , p. 71-89 .
  10. ↑ Marianna Jäger / Susan Gürber: Interview: The secret curriculum. The focus is on the discipline in the class. phAkzente 2, 2012. https://phzh.ch/MAPortrait_Data/55311/34/sgu_phakzente12-2.pdf