Re: hidden curriculum?
Robert Bahruth (rbahruth who-is-at claven.idbsu.edu)
Tue, 7 Apr 1998 10:32:57 +0100
Jay, I feel the hidden agenda is less and less covert to many of us,
however I work with teachers in the field on a fairly regular basis and
have found that many do not see the "equiping of non-mainstream students
with mainstream trappings" (Lindfors 1987) as a dimension of the hidden
agenda. It represents the bias which produces the "normal curve". The
language which has emerged recently to "get students ready to learn" seems
to me more about getting students ready to fit. In bilingual education one
of the battles is to overcome the media's overall effect in demonizing
bilingual education as a term, what Macedo (1994) refers to as "negatively
charged words". If language were considered for the purposes of either
seeking truth or hiding it, I'd have to say the Pentagonese and similarly
spin-doctored renditions of language continue to be constructed in order to
keep people in the dark. The language of deficit is still alive and well in
the day to day discourse of educators who use the terminology
matter-of-factly, and acritically (eg. drop out, discipline problem,
ADHD, learning disabled, at-risk, normal curve, etc.). This tells me the
agenda these terms represent is still hidden for many. Kinneman (1992)
stated "Perhaps the greatest obstacle to school reform is the fact that we
all went to school". And Michael Crichton introduced the term
"intellectual dupe" to describe people who use terminology acritically as
received language created intentionally by others to benefit some and
victimize others. He used the example of "Japan bashing" which flashed
through our media a few years ago, and explained that the term was
generated by a PR person for the Japanese government. It made any
critiques of Japan unfashionable overnight. I have stated that the hidden
agenda is so well hidden that most teachers are unaware of it. I still
feel this is so for far too many teachers and it is certainly given little
attention in teacher education programs where perfecting the lesson plan of
trivial persuit takes precedence over substance. I have two interpretations
of Kinneman's comment. One, of course, is that we tend to teach the way we
were taught and we bring our preconceived notions of what schools should
look like into our classrooms. The second, however is more closely related
to Macedo's concept of "Literacy for Stupidification" (1994). I feel the
pursuit of trivia and the reduction of knowledge and learning to
memorization of fragmented facts and distorted representations of history
represents the hidden agenda of the curriculum and the gross cheapening of
what it means to teach. So, I would have to say, the hidden agenda is
alive and well and anonymously schleping around in too many schools and
classrooms. The devastating results of the hidden agenda may well be
measured in the lack of criticity in educators employing language of
deficit as intellectual dupes, and students who are apathetic to democratic
struggle and literacy as a daily practice. In the words of Paulo Freire,
We have far too many "literate illiterates" who can read words but have
been deskilled in their ability to juxtapose the word with the world to
expose hipocrisy, something Terry Eagleton (The Significance of Theory)
feels young children are perfectly capable of doing before the onset of
schooling. Macedo also cites a poem by John Ashbery (What is Poetry?) about
the end of schooling:
In School
All the thoughts got combed out:
What was left was like a field.
I don't know of many educators who would admit to doing this, yet they do
in many invisible and acritical ways which leaves me to believe the hidden
agenda is still covert.