ABSTRACT
It is widely assumed that schools are settings that provide children and young people with the skills they will need to succeed in the world. Th at has been their explicit function since the emergence of formal public education. Careful research on gender and education since the 1970s has documented, though, that schools also have a very powerful “hidden curriculum,” one that has functioned to ignore, silence, and sexualize girls while empowering boys (Block 1984; Sadker and Sadker 1994). In this chapter, we review evidence suggesting that this hidden curriculum, while still at work, has been augmented during the past two decades with a more overt and punitive system of control.
