Nitin Deckha: Good day everyone. Today we're going to talk about The Hidden Curriculum. If you're thinking about what you study at school, that is an academic subject. But think about what else you learn while at school. Let's use the analogy of an iceberg. Up here, the part you can see, that's the academic subject, and, in post secondary it might be a major, or a program of study. But even when you're in secondary school or, even in Kindergarten you're still learning basic things. You're learning some mathematical concepts, you're learning how to read, write. Later on you might have social sciences, music, art, physical education. That is the formal curriculum, if you'd like, which we would have guidelines around provincially let's say. But then, there's something that we don't necessarily think about, but what sociology calls the hidden curriculum. And that is, things like the norms, the values, and the procedures, and, if you go back to your experience of elementary school, what were some of the norms you learned? Well, you may have learned how to raise your hand, you may have learned to take turns, and one of the first things we do from Kindergarten to grade one often is, you learn how to sit down at a desk and be quiet. Those are all these kinds of norms for things like ... You become ... The various kinds of rules that schools have. Then there are different kinds of values. The values would be well, you are supposed to work hard, you're supposed to have some kind of academic ambition. There's a kind of meritocracy involved, meaning that if you work hard and do well then you will sort of rise to the top, and, that could have the advantage of going on to post secondary school and further education, and that kind of gets reinforced in other kinds of ways as well. What we call also sort of streaming, where we divide students between whose sort of our kind ... We think of them as academically inclined, and we create a pathway for them, and then others that we do not. The procedures relate to things like recess, and when lunch is and, in terms of the schools disciplinary rules, and that has changed over time of course but we see for example, things like zero tolerance policies. Things like, how students have to learn how to avoid detentions, suspensions, expulsions, those kinds of things. And those only increase or intensify, as you get older. Now, what I'm going to talk about is the sociological perspective that sociology provides, and how we can look a little bit further into the hidden curriculum.