The Hidden Curriculum of High School
originally written 2014
Out of paternal sense of love and duty, my education was planned and my life dictated. Certainly, the prison of home schooling was built for my protection, but like a son of fallen Adam, I vowed to test the laws of God. When divine punishment was not forthcoming, my transgressive spirit stretched further.
By the time I was sixteen, I had been born again. Despite being baptized by my pastor in the river as an outward sign of my forced devotion, I came up through the cold water alienated and confused. I was dancing to the warden’s tune, while plotting my escape. But I had nowhere to run.
I was trying to find a way out. Freedom would come slowly. But even when I found some semblance of freedom, deliberate living would still be far away. The freedom found during high school and the early years of college turned out to be a mixed blessing.
During these years, I found a freedom from the restrictive boundaries of my youth. But I was only rebelling against the dictates of others, while exercising a blind volition. I had no freedom to live my life as I wanted.
To make matters worse, I didn’t even know what I wanted. Although less restricted, I was directionless. Instead of living deliberately, I drifted mindlessly.
Seeking a journey for truth, I became intoxicated by freedom and succumbed to wanderlust. Eagerly breaking away from youthful prisons, my exodus stalled in the deserts of experimentation and transgression.
When I was sixteen, my parents allowed me to re-enter secular society. I had forcefully demanded from the start of home schooling that I would return to a normal life one day. Half-tamed by my captivity, I had matured and embraced my public self.
I was a good Christian boy. I had been publicly confirmed and congratulated by the whole congregation. I had been baptized in the river and my sins had been washed away. I had proved my merits and acted the part of a good Christian boy so completely that a great trust was extended.
My parents felt secure in the external signs of my religiosity. They were no doubt sure that I had been fully converted. I had become a faithful follower of Christ, so a return to public schooling seemed sensible and safe. In the fall of 1991, I was enrolled in senior high school as a sophomore.
As far as anyone knew, I was a model Christian – baptized with water and “on fire” with the blood of the lamb. I half-believed it myself at times. I certainly played the part. This had been my only way out of the tyranny of my home. Sent to Biblical boot-camp for the past few years and geared up in the armor of the Lord, my parents believed I had internalized a spiritual discipline. They believed that I had become a soldier for Christ.
They assumed that my faith would withstand the snares of the secular world. But unbeknownst to them, I had already undergone a secular transformation. Before high school began, I was already losing my religion.
I was in a paradoxical position. Like Werner Heisenberg once acknowledged, "If someone were to say that I had not been a Christian, he would be wrong. But if someone were to say that I had been a Christian, he would be saying too much." (1)
I had kept up appearances, diligently polishing the Christian façade, but internally this public face had cracked. During high school this façade would to crumble. I would come to sacrifice Christ for the secular sacraments of sex, alcohol, and rock & roll. My new secular environment unleashed a devilish spirit, and over the next few years I would let this beast run wild.
Being an adolescent in a public high school was tough. Actually, it was excruciatingly painful. I was caught between two senses of self: the good Christian boy, an established public identity that I had worn over the last three years, and another identity that grew from my inner self, which was emerging in this new secular environment.
I didn’t know who I was and I didn’t understand the new game I had entered. I was unsure how seriously I needed to take my schooling because high school seemed like a joke. Most of my peers treated the routines of schooling like a suburban crosswalk: you only follow the rules and walk between the lines on those rare occasions when police are watching; the rest of the time you do as you please and break the law at will.
Despite the outward rituals of schooling, I quickly sensed my peers were playing a game that had nothing to do with education - a game that adults didn't understand. Living at the borders of a complex social ecology, I was lost and baffled. I didn’t fit and I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know how to dress, how to speak, how to act. I had no friends.
At first, high school was a Darwinian jungle, all predators and prey. I was fresh meat, trying not to be eaten alive. I was isolated in a hostile environment. Playing school under the prying eyes of teachers and parents was the easy part. Classes were simple, teachers were accommodating, and exams were surprisingly easy. The harder test was learning how to survive and thrive in the savage social world of the teenage animal kingdom.
The routines of schooling mask a hidden curriculum. Teachers rarely acknowledge its existence, but students intuitively understand and comply. Beneath the academic facade lies subtle rituals and a fight for social status. Socialization is the primary imperative of the institution called we call “school,” not education in its broader scope, nor training in the narrower sense.
Yet schooling in America is not socialization into the adult world. Instead, students are coddled by a rosy idyllic garden during elementary school only to be later thrown into a cruel teenage pantomime of American society: a status-driven, class-based, red in tooth and claw struggle for power and fame.
Living in the northwestern United States, in Oregon, elementary schools seemed to provide a homogenizing social experience. Ethnic, class, religious, and personal differences were boxed out by an ideology of friendship, fairness, and follow the leader. More than literacy and mathematics, elementary schools drilled a deeper lesson: following directions and living peacefully with your peers.
Grade school teachers socialized kids into thinking that we all live in one big happy family led harmoniously by the adults in control of our lives. As long as we do as we’re told, play nice, and treat everyone fairly, then all is well in world. Of course, this is all a lie. We live in an ethnically diverse, morally fractured, competitive, caste-based, racist, existentially seething, alienating society where not everyone has an equal chance to succeed and never will.
The idyllic ideology of Eden taught in grade school begins to crack by junior high and the lies began to fall before a harsh reality. Kids begin to realize the real world is unfair and brutal so they begin to treat each other accordingly. The social fissions and corruption of the adult world collide with the natural rebelliousness and experimentation of adolescence.
By the time teenagers have begun to scratch out their identity, navigate the expectations of maturity, and advance towards the inner mystery of adulthood, the world reveals itself in all its contradiction and cruelty. For most the veil is lifted by the age of sixteen, if not earlier. The horror of horrors lie exposed.
Kids realize the part they must play in the savage circus we call society. As the fictional Vernon Little exclaims about the "lie-world" children live within, "The truth is a corrosive thing...The Human Condition...Watch out for that fucker." (2) Reality bites!
High school is the institutionalized fall from grace. It is a slaughter house. Teenagers find their childhood gouged out, blindly falling over the next few years into the razored webs of adulthood. Easily corrupted by the dim hope of freedom, most teenagers eagerly rage to embrace the dying of their light, but not all.
Some grasp hard at their naivety. These lambs blissfully stumble past much of the violence by hiding in their ignorance, pitching a tent in daddy’s protective checkbook, clutching at a crucifix, or diving into some other mechanism of escape. Yet these lambs too will be led to the block. No one escapes.
The hidden curriculum of high school contains several important truths that every student struggles to learn. While the state mandated curriculum is optional, and easily subverted, these deeper lessons were unavoidable, arising from the necessity of survival.
The first lesson was paradoxical, but strangely familiar. All adults are enemies, until you become one. Most teenagers want to become adults as quickly as possible. Teenagers desperately yearn to knife away their innocence and the restrictions of childhood in order to gain the bittersweet fruits of adult freedom, completely unaware of the crippling responsibilities and consequences that follow.
As children we live in a state of debt peonage to our adult overlords to whom we owe our life and love. We become more conscious of the circumstances of our slavery during adolescence. Teenagers live uneasily in the humiliation of bondage, even though most still love their masters.
All teenagers yearn for those two magic days, marked by the astral signs of birth, when freedom is bestowed and life truly begins. These secular sacraments are the eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays. In America, these dates are more anticipated than the second coming of Christ.
By adolescence, teenagers are keenly aware of their bondage. Children are human clay being molded by parents, priests, and teachers for distant and alien ends. Adolescence begins to breed a seething rebellion against the institutional structures that control the contours of youth.
Teachers bear the worst of it. These poorly paid professionals are the tyrannical gatekeepers of the adult world. Public school teachers are pitiless mercenaries employed by the state to torture all teenagers with boredom, rules, exams, and homework. Middle schools and high schools only appear to educate.
Beneath the surface of ordered classrooms, hall monitors, and report cards there lies an incensed rabble often bubbling into anarchy. Teenagers only play the role of student so they can resist any actual learning. Every classroom seethes with silent hatred, refusal, and subtle revolt. Teachers are in charge only to the extent that they do not push their prisoners too hard.
Thus, the primary duty of all teenagers is to resist schooling. This art form is taken one step further by the most ambitious students: Resist schooling while earning good grades.
The second lesson of the hidden curriculum was more subtle. Pagan shamans once believed that having knowledge of true names was a form of power. To name objects was to know. To know was to master. Real friendships during high school, although possible, were rare. Most teenagers formed temporary alliances, treating each other as rivals in a game of conquest.
For protection, you learned to hide your identity, to wear masks, and to practice subterfuge. For aggression, you stabbed at others with labels, wounded with pranks, and tore down the unsuspecting physically and emotionally. The powerful proudly conquered the weak.
Popularity was the prize. Society was a skirmish and high school halls were filled with marauding teens armed with verbal bludgeons, savagely striking with a stinging sense of sarcasm and entitlement. The unpopular students largely cower in fear, avoiding public spaces at all costs. Of course, not all the young gladiators were aware of the arena, understood its cruelty, or willingly participated in the gory contest of battle. Some scurried away from the predators and hid beneath the rocks.
Popularity is power. Like most other forms of authority, it is largely accumulated through savage exploitation. Most popular kids calculate the loss of lesser lives like warriors conquering for prestige. Many scalp hard, and wear the bloody pulp as a badge of virility and honor. I saw countless innocents fall under the knife, myself included. The wounds cut deep.
During my sophomore year, I was socially bloodied, but not often publicly humiliated. I licked my wounds, avoided the most powerful potentates, and quickly learned to strike first blood. By my junior year I fought my way up the social hierarchy to earn a place in the shadow of kings. By my senior year, I was royalty.
As the battle for popularity was brutally learned, the next lesson of the hidden curriculum became strikingly obvious. The high school is a structured social hierarchy, tiered like the ancient chain of being. There exist two separate spheres of influence. In the adult fiefdom, the school principal was enthroned on high, supreme in power and aloof, aided in trinity by the vice principle and dean. This administrative godhead was attended to by gradations of lesser deities who engineered the institution of socialization: teachers, counselors, and coaches.
The actual breaking of the teenage beasts was done by an army of under-educated lecturers and disseminators of standardized tests. These so-called "teachers" were not really paid to teach. They tried to tame the savages through rituals of sadistic boredom and mindless conformity. Students are locked in caged classrooms, daily broken by homework, exams, report cards, and class rankings. We play this game because we're supposed to.
But within the halls and outside the walls, there exists another sphere of influence, more important and more immediate. Graded down to the lower depths of hell, the petty fiefdoms of the teenage rabble keep local control: athletic princes, fashion princesses, preppy courtiers, class clowns, drug dealers, thugs, and an endless motley assortment of ill-defined cliques.
Despite the academic pretension of the American high school, the singular purpose of this institution seems to be sorting individuals into social cliques, loosely related to the hierarchical social structure of the adult world. Students must find a petty fiefdom and pledge allegiance to secure identity and friendship. It can be vicious. Not all teenagers make it through this ring of fire.
Teenage identity is socially negotiated by the silent consent of the majority. Some use humor, some intelligence, some physical prowess, some beauty, and some use violence. From the first day of fall term, labels are branded about by the powerful. One either accepts the hand of fate or struggles valiantly against it. The trenches of the social world are daily assaulted and the flags of fidelity switch back and forth over the scorched terrain. More than a few lose their life in the struggle for identity and acceptance.
The institution of the American high school is not just a physical and social reality. It is also ideological. This was the final lesson of the hidden curriculum – and the hardest to learn.
Beyond the ordered classrooms and tiered identity groups, there was an ideological message inscribed on the walls and emblazoned into every textbook, although it has devolved into mush over the last quarter century. If the practical purpose of high school was socialization, then the ideological purpose was nationalization. The ideology of Americanism is a confused rhetoric of equality, meritocracy, and aristocracy.
For most teens these three principles morph into a mocking myth called the "American Dream." It goes something like this: Teenagers are second-class citizens equal only in powerlessness. While forced to follow the dictates of adult society, youthful slavery is eventually exchanged for citizenship, granted in stages at eighteen and twenty-one. Thereby, all young adults gain unequal measures of quasi-freedom, while slowly selling themselves into another form of slavery, a career. They barter away their newly granted liberty in a labor market, exchanging hope for a wage.
Students mercilessly compete for academic distinction and degrees, often financially indebting themselves, just to fetch a higher price on the road to serfdom. The rewards of prosperity, however, are limited and not equally available to all, especially those marked by the disadvantages of poverty, gender, race, or disability.
Because America is one of the most inequitable countries in the developed world, the greatest spoils are bestowed on those born into privilege. The rest claw up the broken social ladder, striving for success. Few make it.
References
(1) David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science (New York, 2008), 77.
(2) DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little (New York, 2003), 125, 28, 129.