ABSTRACT
Chapter Five moves inside the classroom to consider how the formal and hidden curriculum shape schooling at Lillydown Primary. Drawing on ethnographic research, it presents a more complex picture of the enactment and reproductive effects of the hidden and formal curriculum by complicating neo-Marxist theories with the notion of social haunting to highlight how ghosts work, at least to some extent, to challenge and open up spaces for transformation. The chapter argues that the hidden curriculum is enacted through more traditional performances of authority and working-class codes of being, rather than conditions and relations of control. It highlights potential spaces for more relevant and localised forms of teaching and learning to be created. Schooling under capitalism, however, produces tensions within a social haunting. Lillydown's industrial past encouragingly shapes experiences and processes of schooling whilst being implicated in reproducing classed divisions and relations.
