Confronting the Hidden Curriculum: Call for Resistance or Tool for Success?

The hidden curriculum—the implicit norms, values, and institutional expectations that exist alongside the formal academic curriculum—is a familiar concept in sociology and education circles. In recent years, the term has made its way into the mainstream. While once critiqued as a mechanism of social control and oppression to be resisted, the hidden curriculum is increasingly framed as a toolkit that, when learned, can enable the successful navigation of educational spaces and facilitate social mobility. In this review article, we summarize the literature on the hidden curriculum, mapping its origins in educational and critical theory and tracing its diffusion into popular discourse. In doing so, we examine how scholars have defined and operationalized the term; explore the range of contexts in which researchers have studied the hidden curriculum; illustrate how practitioners have adopted the concept; and discuss the consequences of this shift. We conclude with a proposed agenda for future research. This analysis speaks to ongoing debates within sociology concerning the extent to which educational institutions serve to reduce, reproduce, or exacerbate inequality and invites reflection on the problem of what may be lost when scholarly terms come to be redefined as they migrate outside of academia.