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intended set of learnings are information and skills, and, more importantly, beliefs,
norms, perceptions, meanings and feelings. In summary, many of these constitute
the common-sense knowledge and understandings...which are so powerful in
shaping ideologies that reflect the views and values of the dominant culture... (2003,
pp. 34-35)
The original conceptualisation of the hidden curriculum by Jackson (1968) links with the
view of incidental learning put forth by Dewey; which is the proposition that “...education
was not only purposeful but also inadvertent, and not only explicit but also implicit in its
dynamics” (Sosniak, 2007, p. 112). This incidental learning relates to the hidden curriculum
as it demonstrates a contrast between what is explicitly intended for students to learn and
what students learn as a by product of the expectations of schooling, including ideologies
within the curriculum itself. As Jane Martin explains:
Implicit in hidden curriculum talk, moreover, is a contrast between hidden curriculum
and what for want of a better name I will call curriculum proper—that thing, difficult
as it is to define, about which philosophers and educational theorists have long debated
and which curriculum specialists have long tried to plan and develop. The contrast is
between what it is openly intended that students learn and what, although not openly
intended, they do, in fact, learn. (1983, p. 122)
Knowledge constructed and presented as objective in social studies textbooks, as Giroux and
Penna claim “...often represents a one-sided and theoretically distorted view of the subject
under study. Knowledge is often accepted as truth legitimizing a specific view of the world
that is either questionable or patently false” (1983, p. 109). Even though the knowledge
presented in textbooks is often one sided (as the data analysis chapters in this dissertation
demonstrate), it is, nevertheless important to point out as Smith and Lovat (2003); Martin
(1983); and Jackson (1968) do, that what constitutes the hidden curriculum is not necessarily
negative, it can also be positive, with Smith and Lovat writing “...the messages of the hidden
curriculum are not, by definition, necessarily negative. They may be positive. It is the value
stance of the observer that will decide this” (2003, p. 35). The application of the hidden
curriculum to this project is to demonstrate, through identifying the various discourses that
emerge from History curriculum content, the silenced messages that emerge, that are not part
of the explicit learning outcomes, but when viewed across an historical era begin to emerge
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