In every space where we gather—classrooms humming with curiosity, boardrooms echoing ambition, or around kitchen tables warm with evening chatter—there’s another kind of teaching quietly unfolding. You won’t find it detailed in lesson plans or corporate handbooks, and it doesn’t appear on any syllabus. Yet, it quietly shapes how we understand ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it.
This is the covert curriculum.
The term might sound familiar, occasionally popping up alongside the more established concept of the "hidden curriculum," introduced by Philip Jackson in 1968. Jackson described the hidden curriculum as those unspoken lessons woven through school routines—the norms, values, and behaviours absorbed without formal instruction. Michael Apple (1979) deepened this understanding, showing how these hidden lessons reinforce existing power structures and inequalities. Henry Giroux (1983) went further, exploring how the hidden curriculum might also become a place of resistance and transformation, where students learn not just compliance, but critical thinking and active engagement.
These scholars illuminated the shadows of education. But my work on Radical Gothic Relationality has taken a different angle, brining attention to the affective, spectral and relational forces embedded within these hidden teachings.
The covert curriculum isn’t just about norms and power; it’s about emotional atmospheres, the stories that remain untold, and the silences charged with meaning.
Haunting Academic Halls
Consider a university seminar. The official curriculum presents theories, data, and methodologies. Yet, quietly and consistently, students learn whose stories matter most and whose experiences become mere footnotes or token gestures. When textbooks sideline voices from the Global South, or professors habitually overlook perspectives from marginalised communities, students internalise a message about worth, relevance, and authority.
In the United States today, we see this vividly as classrooms and libraries become battlegrounds, stripped of books by queer authors or histories that honestly confront racial injustice. Every removed book or silenced story teaches students implicitly whose identity is acceptable—and whose very existence is considered controversial or expendable.
And even where inclusive policies are publicly embraced, they often serve as symbolic gestures that fail to dismantle the deeper, systemic barriers to access, equity, and belonging. They leave students to navigate environments that claim inclusion while quietly upholding exclusion through curriculum choices, funding disparities, and institutional tone. The result is a pedagogy of erasure - where the language of belonging is spoken fluently, even as the students most in need of it are slowly taught they were never meant to stay.
Beyond the Boardroom
The covert curriculum is equally powerful in workplaces. Think of the corporate workshop that officially champions collaboration and innovation. Yet, subtly, employees quickly learn whose contributions are valued, whose voices dominate meetings, and whose ideas quietly slip away unacknowledged. Consider how performance reviews, ostensibly designed to measure productivity, actually instruct workers in navigating office politics, often encouraging conformity at the expense of authenticity and psychological safety.
Picture a talented employee consistently overlooked because they speak softly, or the outspoken team member gently encouraged to ‘tone it down,’ implicitly teaching everyone else to choose conformity over candour. Imagine the employee who quietly excels despite inadequate leadership yet is repeatedly passed over for resources and opportunities—their steadfast resilience misinterpreted as complacency.
This silently instructs colleagues that visibility matters more than capability, and that genuine merit too often stays hidden unless one engages in self-promotion that suppresses peers rather than uplifts them.
Personal Hauntings
Our everyday lives are deeply shaped by this covert curriculum too. Around a dinner table, a teenager quickly learns what emotions can be safely expressed by watching parents handle conflict—perhaps noticing their father’s silence when upset or their mother’s subtle shift in tone when hurt. Friendships silently instruct us on how vulnerable we can afford to be, showing which feelings can be openly shared and which must remain hidden behind careful smiles and guarded words.
Think about the friend group where certain difficult topics—like grief, mental health struggles, or past mistakes—linger quietly beneath the surface, acknowledged only in fleeting, uncomfortable glances. This implicitly teaches emotional boundaries and sets conditions on intimacy.
When honesty becomes risky and vulnerability feels unsafe, connections grow shallow and trust erodes. Yet, when these silences are courageously broken, friendships can deepen into authentic, healing bonds built on mutual openness and shared resilience.
Likewise, families who avoid uncomfortable conversations—about trauma, identity, addiction, or conflict—pass down more than just silence. They pass down blueprints for emotional containment, teaching each generation how to withhold, how to perform harmony at the expense of truth.
But when even one person dares to name what’s been buried, to speak with tenderness into the unspeakable, the entire lineage begins to shift. What was once shame becomes story. What was once hidden becomes held. And in that holding, healing becomes possible.
Why It Matters
Naming the covert curriculum is an act of resistance. It refuses the comfort of pretending that harm only happens out loud. It exposes the soft violences buried in silence, the quiet trainings in compliance, the unspoken rules that teach us to shrink, to smile, to survive without ever being seen.
To bring these subterranean lessons into the light is to interrupt the lie that what’s unspoken is neutral. It is to insist that learning is never just content—it is culture, it is ideology, it is atmosphere. And when we attune to that, we begin to rewire the spaces we move through.
Recognising the covert curriculum doesn’t just help us teach or lead better. It lets us reclaim learning as something insurgently human—raw, affective, and alive. It invites us to build environments where honesty isn’t punished, difference isn’t pathologised, and relationality isn’t a liability but a lifeline.
So ask yourself:
What have you been taught to feel without ever being told?
Whose discomfort have you been trained to accommodate?
What parts of yourself have you learned to quiet in order to belong?
The covert curriculum lives in these moments—in the emotional edits, the careful silences, the glances that warn rather than welcome. But to name it is to unravel it.
And in that unraveling, there is possibility: the chance to unlearn what harms, to imagine otherwise, and to create spaces where the truth is not only tolerated, but needed—where feeling fully is not a liability, but a form of liberation.
Let this be the lesson: what’s unspoken still speaks—so speak back.
¹ Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms (1968); Michael Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (1979); Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (1983).