ABSTRACT
In response to our interview questions, Peter McLaren used Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” to point to a lucid characteristic of the hidden curriculum: “The best way to hide something is to put it right in front of somebody’s eyes where they are not looking for it . . . [the purloined letter] was put in such an obvious place nobody bothered to look there because it was too obvious. That is in a sense a metaphor for what has happened to universities.” Much like the purloined letter, the hidden curriculum hides “in plain sight.” As with many of the scholars we interviewed, McLaren used a metaphor as a beginning to his analysis and wove theory into his lived experiences as an academic. This chapter was written as a companion to the literature review in the introduction to explore ways in which the concept hidden curricula can be explicitly applied to higher education. We wanted to understand how scholar/educators in the academic community perceive and conceptualize the socialization functions of post-secondary school. We interviewed a variety of faculty and administrators, many of whom have contributed to the literature on socialization and hidden curricula in primary and secondary school.
