Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Hidden Curriculum

Advantages Disadvantages

1. Helps prepare us for life 1. Reproduces social class

in a society beyond school. inequalities

2. Teaches children to 2. Outdated social roles are

obey elders. reinforced

3. Minorities are expected

3. Helps maintain law and to assimilate to the
order majority culture 

Pros
1. School’s job is to prepare us for life in a society. Societies need norms that bind
us. If we don’t have a shared culture or shared understandings of good and bad,
right and wrong, our society might crumble. It’s good that schools are a place
where we learn to get along.
2. Children need to be taught to obey adults. Whether it’s at school, home or
elsewhere, adults have a responsibility to correct children when they misbehave.
As a teacher, you have a special obligation to ‘raise people well’, not just teach
them things.
3. Schools would fail to function without rules. The hidden curriculum is
necessary to maintain order and fairness. Rules are necessary for creating calm,
predictable environments in which learning will occur.
Cons

1. Reproduction of social class inequalities. It is possible that the hidden

curriculum subtly teaches working class people that they need to remember their
place in life: to work hard and earn a meager living without complaining. By
contrast, the hidden content taught in posh schools may subtly teach the upper
classes that their job is to become keepers of the moral codes and future bosses of
the poor.
2. Gender roles are reinforced. Some people think schools subtly teach girls to
wait their turn, act like ladies and be polite, while it teaches boys to speak up and
act like authority figures. This might subtly reinforce gender norms from one
generation to the next.
3. People of color and minority cultures are expected to assimilate. If school is
designed to reinforce social rules, are people from minority cultures supposed to
drop their cultural values and norms when at school? Is school forcing cultural
conformity to the dominant culture?