ABSTRACT
A manuscript reader for the journal that published “What Should We Do with a Hidden Curriculum When We Find One?” once told me that although in the interests of anonymity my name had been removed from this paper, he knew I had written it. Yet the essay, with its hints of the author’s emerging feminist sensibility, bears witness to the fact that in 19761 was already becoming a different person. I no longer used the generic form of the masculine pronoun, I made reference to school’s hidden curriculum in sexism, and—perhaps most telling—I suggested that the feminist practice of consciousness raising be taken as a model of what to do with an objectionable hidden curriculum when you find one. In thinking about the education of girls and women I have come to rely on that advice. Realizing, moreover, that it applies equally to boys and men, in The Schoolhome I made the transfer of school’s hidden curriculum in misogyny and anti-domesticity into the curriculum proper one of the staples of good educational practice.
