hidden curriculum?

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Mon, 06 Apr 1998 16:14:09 -0400

In institutions where the motto is "stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap", I
wonder if there is really much of the conservative social agenda for
education that remains hidden?

The "hermeneutics of suspicion" as Ricoeur termed it has been a mainstay of
intellectual analysis in the modernist period. From Marx, Freud, and
thousand others we have heard that true causes and real agendas are hidden
beneath the often deliberately deceptive surfaces of events and institutions.

But is it really still so true? There seems to me very little left of the
veneer of hypocritical well-meaningness that papered over the ugly
realities of interest and prejudice in a more formal and pseudo-courteous
age. And is it surprising that those who are institutionally oppressed are
so little deceived, and what remains of covert ideology is addressed mainly
to the middle-classes?