What Do Schools Teach?

One of the least attractive arguments in recent years has been that schools are relatively unexciting, boring, or what have you, because of mindlessness (Silberman 1970). The argument has it that schools covertly teach all those things that humanistic critics of schools so like to write and talk about-behavioral consensus, institutional rather than personal goals and norms, alienation from one's products, etc.-and that they do so because teachers, administrators, and other educators do not really know what they are doing. However, such a perspective is misleading at best. In the first place, it is thoroughly ahistorical. It ignores the fact that schools were in part designed to teach exactly these things. The hidden curriculum, the tacit teaching of social and economic norms and expectations to students in schools, is not as hidden or mindless as many educators believe. Secondly, it ignores the critical task schools perform as the fundamental set of institutions in advanced industrial societies that certifies adult competence. It pulls schools out of their setting within a larger and much more powerful nexus of economic and political institutions that give schools their meaning. That is, schools seem, by and large, to do what they are supposed to do, at least in terms of roughly providing dispositions and propensities functional in later life in a complex and stratified social and economic order. While there is no doubt that mindlessness does exist other than in Charles Silberman's mind, it is not an adequate descriptive device-any more than venality or indifference-in explaining why schools are so resistant to change or why schools teach what they do (Gintis and