The Implicit Pedagogy and the Hidden Curriculum in Postmodern Education

Abstract

This chapter addresses everyday educational practices known as the “hidden curriculum” and the related term “implicit pedagogy” in today's dominant postmodern theory. It presents results of a survey with preschool and school teachers (N=813) in Croatia and Slovenia in selected three determinants of the hidden curriculum: empathy, personality traits, and preschool and school teachers' attitudes towards space characteristics. In addition to interesting results describing current conditions in these vital populations of institutional life of children, the chapter is getting closer to answering questions like: “What else do children learn in kindergarten and school?” “What affects children's learning, and is nowhere to be ‘measured' in the context of learning?” “Are the phenomena of hidden curriculum that we want to look at the same in the two neighboring countries, in the same groups of professionals?” This is, in the context of postmodernism and postmodern education theories, one of the crucial points.