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CHAPTER TWO A LANGUAGE FOR SELF-UNDERSTANDING Prior to beginning my course work for my doctoral program, I believed that the way schools were set up in the United States was pretty much the only way they could be run. I had been exposed to plenty of critiques of certain individual aspects of schools, but never to any systemic critique. What I mean by a systemic critique is an interpretation of current American schools that calls into question their very function, structures, and practices. My doctoral program was largely centered on such systemic critiques, and at first I was taken aback by these ideas that challenged the institution to which I had invested so much of my life, yet the more I thought about my experiences with schools through the lens of these critiques, the more those ideas made sense. In essence, my readings and teachers in my doctoral program opened my eyes to a whole new interpretation of my life in schools. I read authors including Henry Giroux, Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, John Dewey, Ira Shor, Ivan Illich, Svi Shapiro, David Purpel, Nel Noddings, John Holt, and many, many others who all questioned the fundamental purpose of American schools. They argued that conventional schools (i.e., normative or traditional schools), schools as almost all Americans know them, are set up to serve purposes that run counter to our country’s highest political, moral, and intellectual ideals. These authors’ main argument centers on the idea that schools mirror, or emulate, some of the worst aspects of American culture—hyperindividualism, alienation, competition, consumerism, social inequality, patriarchy, and so on and that through this mirroring, schools serve to validate, preserve, and perpetuate those characteristics. In other words, schools are deliberately designed to perpetuate the inequitable political, social, and economic systems in our society by molding students to accept, without question, the status quo ways of viewing and interacting with the world. These authors argue that the primary way in which this is done is through the teaching of the “hidden curriculum” in schools. Henry Giroux, 17 18 FREE SCHOOL TEACHING in an article in Clearing House, defined the hidden curriculum as those “unstated norms, values, and beliefs transmitted to students through the underlying structure of schooling.”1 His definition is similar to ElizabethVallance’s found in her article, “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum,” and both authors argue that these lessons or consequences of schooling occur systematically, but are never formally recognized or made explicit in the current rationales for education. Different authors have enumerated the many lessons or functions of the hidden curriculum. Elizabeth Vallance listed the functions of the hidden curriculum as being “the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility, [and] the perpetuation of traditional class structure.”2 Philip Jackson, in “The Daily Grind,” argued that the hidden curriculum teaches students to deal with three major facts of life—“crowds, praise, and power.”3 Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society, argues that the hidden curriculum of schools teaches the perpetuation of class differences, and encourages kids to be consumers of grades, classes, and degrees in order to have a “better life” and thus become good consumers as adults. He also argues that the hidden curriculum teaches that “true” and valuable learning only occurs inside a school or some other licensing arena, that what cannot be measured becomes secondary, and that students should give up individual interests and have others determine what and when they should learn.4 John Taylor Gatto, in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, outlined seven specific lessons of the hidden curriculum. He argued that schools teach children to accept confusion by presenting information in a superficial manner and out of context from everything else, particularly students’ lives. The hidden curriculum also teaches class position, that students are meant to stay in the class (social class) to which they were “assigned.” The hidden curriculum teaches indifference, that the constant shifting from one subject to another shows kids that nothing is worth truly focusing on. Gatto also detailed the lessons of emotional dependency, provisional self-esteem, and that one can’t hide, arguing that children are taught to identify their self-worth in accordance with how others view them, and that they cannot escape this constant evaluation. And lastly, Gatto identified the lesson of intellectual dependency that teaches children to wait for someone to tell them what to do and to suppress any of their own natural desires or inclinations.5 Other...

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