It Is Time to Bring Education Out of Hiding

What if the most lasting lessons children learn at school are the ones no teacher writes on the board? Ahead of the Global Islamic Holistic Education Summit in Jakarta, writer and Islamic education observer M Tata Taufik argues that education should stop leaving those lessons hidden.

The Sept. 5-6 summit will bring together education leaders, academics, and pesantren administrators. Its focus on holistic education prompts Taufik to look back at the pesantren tradition, which he says has long treated education as something that extends beyond a strict division between classroom and daily life.

He wants the “core” of education to shift from the hidden curriculum to a holistic curriculum. The idea of a hidden curriculum emerged from concern about what children experience in school but do not find in textbooks, schedules, or examinations. In 1968, Philip W. Jackson’s book Life in Classrooms described classrooms not simply as places where teachers deliver lessons and students receive them, but as social environments.

A child may be active while another waits. One student may receive frequent praise, while another is repeatedly corrected. Some participate fully; others gradually withdraw. Schools can easily identify students who answer questions, earn grades, and appear in rankings. Yet a child who attends every day, causes no trouble, attracts little attention, and is rarely praised can remain almost invisible. That child is still learning, Taufik writes, but may be learning lessons that schools do not measure.

Students learn when they may speak and when they must remain silent. They learn what it feels like to wait, who receives attention, who holds power, which answers earn approval, and which behavior draws reprimands. Jackson examined classroom life through crowds, praise, and power. Taufik accepts the value of identifying this hidden curriculum, then poses his challenge: once education knows where it is hiding, why keep it hidden? The task now, he argues, is to make those experiences visible rather than allowing them to continue shaping children unnoticed.