Neoliberalism’s Unwritten Curriculum for Achievement

• In Event: Critiquing Neoliberalism and Its Impact on Schooling

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a four-year anthropological study of middle-class culture and schooling in the Midwestern United States to examine one pattern of adaptation to the dictates of neoliberalism: adopting an ideological bearing and set of practices oriented toward giving students the image if not the substance of competitive success. The paper sketches the contours of a neoliberal unwritten curriculum for achievement, and more specifically, identifies the constituent beliefs and practices that require measures of economic, social, cultural, and psychological capital. The paper argues that the most powerful and unsettling messages of the hidden curriculum are that education serves primarily instrumental (credentialing) purposes, and that a primary function of the school is to sort students accordingly.

Author

• Peter Demerath, University of Minnesota