Social skills are highly valued in any society, and a mastery of them is widely accepted as an indication of a child’s maturity. The school is a miniature society, and many individuals fail in school because they are either unable or unwilling to learn or use the values, attitudes and skills contained in the hidden curriculum. We do a great disservice to these students when we make them feel that they have failed in education when they have, in fact, only failed to conform to the school’s socialization standards.

Theories of Schooling and Inequality

There are several theoretical perspectives on the nature of modern education and its implications for inequality.

Bernstein: Language Codes

One approach emphasizes linguistic skills. In the 1970s, Basil Bernstein argued that children from varying backgrounds develop different codes, or forms of speech, during their early lives, which affect their subsequent school experience (Bernstein 1975). He is not concerned with differences in vocabulary or verbal skills, as these are usually thought of, his interest is in systematic differences in ways of using language, particularly contrasting poorer and wealthier children.

Bernstein’s ideas help us understand why those from certain socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be ‘underachievers’ at school. The following traits have been associated with restricted code speech, all of them inhibiting a child’s educational chances:

• The child probably receives limited responses to questions asked at home, and therefore is likely to be both less well informed and less curious about the wider world than those mastering elaborated codes.
• The child often finds it difficult to respond to the unemotional and abstract language used in teaching, as well as to appeals to general principles of school discipline.
• Much of what the teacher says is likely to be incomprehensible, using language in a way the child is not accustomed to. The child may attempt to cope with this by translating the teacher’s language into something s/he is familiar with – but then could fail to grasp the very principles the teacher intends to convey.
• While the child experiences little difficulty with rote or ‘drill’ learning, s/he may have major difficulties in grasping, conceptual distinctions involving generalization and abstraction.

Illich: The Hidden Curriculum

One of the most controversial writers on educational theory is Ivan Illich. He is noted for his criticisms of modern economic development, which he describes as a process whereby previously self-sufficient people are dispossessed of their traditional skills and made to rely on doctors for their health, teachers for their schooling, television for their entertainment and employers for their subsistence. Illich argues that the very notion of compulsory schooling – now accepted throughout the world – should be questioned (1973). He stresses the connection between the development of education and the requirements of the economy for discipline and hierarchy. Illich argues that schools have developed to cope with four basic tasks:

1. The provision of custodial care
2. The distribution of people among occupational roles
3. The learning of dominant values
4. The acquisition of socially approved skills and knowledge.