ABSTRACT
The hidden curriculum, entailing the unnoticed as well as unwanted outcomes of education has attracted continuous attention throughout the last decades within the sociology of education. Within the sociology of music education, however, attention has been rather scarce. This chapter directs the attention towards hidden curricula in higher music education, including conservatoires, academies, and university schools of music. Three categories of sources constitute the points of departure as well as reflective grounds. The first includes two of the existing studies within music education. The second comprises studies of music education that do not explicitly address the hidden perspective but still contribute with vital information; and the third takes account of the general scholarship on hidden curricula. A curiosity of how studies of hidden curricula can reveal unnoticed sides of the reciprocal relationship between higher music education and society runs through the whole chapter. Besides drawing on the mentioned categories, these unnoticed sides are also reflected in the works of Bernstein, Bourdieu, and Laclau and Mouffe. After discussing traits of hidden curricula sorted in ‘hidden in plain sight’, ‘yet to be discovered’, and ‘revealed to some, hidden for others’, some concluding remarks follow up Jane Martin’s question: ‘what should we do with a hidden curriculum when we find one’?
