KARACHI:
The formal curriculum outlines what students are intended to learn (like mathematics or history), while the hidden curriculum shapes their beliefs, behaviours and understandings of society through the unwritten rules, cultural values and institutional norms of the classroom. It simply means that the hidden curriculum represents the powerful, unspoken lessons embedded within the structure of everyday schooling.
As a passionate teacher, I am deeply pained to witness and experience personal, institutional, cultural and civilisational entropy — manifested as denial, distortion, distraction and deflection — going unchecked in our society. Two questions constantly agitate my mind: Where do we belong? And what do our kids learn from both the formal and hidden curricula?
One of the many things that bring tears to my eyes is to see teachers reward laggards and mediocre students and victimise bright students, particularly, girl students, on ethnic and irrational grounds. Is this the product of our educational system?
This denial – refusal of acknowledgment and appreciation, stubbornness and stiff-neckedness among teachers and other members of society – is causing the collapse of our educational system. We must thoroughly revisit everything we teach, as well as the methods of those who teach at all levels. In what kind of system and environment are our children being raised.
Tasleem Naz Abro
Islamabad
