Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work*

Abstract

This chapter offers tentative empirical support of the preceding arguments by providing illustrative examples of differences in student work in classrooms in contrasting social class communities. The examples were gathered as part of an ethnographical study of curricular, pedagogical and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary schools. The chapter suggests that there is a "hidden curriculum" in school work that has profound implication for the theory—and consequence—of everyday activity in education. The methods of resistance that the working-class children are developing in school are only temporarily, and potentially, liberating. In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. In the middle-class school the children are developing somewhat different potential relationships to capital, authority, and work. One has a relationship to the system of ownership, to other people, and to the content and process of one's own productive activity.

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