Schools

Schooling is, on the face of it, a formal institution with a defined curriculum and a set number of subjects to be taught -- but schools function as agencies of socialisation in far more subtle ways than the official timetable suggests. Alongside the stated curriculum runs what sociologists call a hidden curriculum: a set of lessons children absorb about how the world works that no syllabus ever states outright. A commonly cited example from Indian schools is the informal expectation that girls, but rarely boys, will sweep the classroom -- an unstated lesson about gendered division of labour delivered through routine practice rather than any lesson plan. Some schools deliberately work against this hidden curriculum by assigning such tasks across gender lines rather than by the usual pat …