Higher Education and Tracking
While studies on the hidden curriculum mostly focus on fundamental primary and secondary education, higher education also feels the effects of this latent knowledge. For example, gender biases become present in specific fields of study; the quality of and experiences associated with prior education become more significant; and class, gender, and race become more evident at higher levels of education.
One additional aspect of hidden curriculum that plays a major part in the development of students and their fates is tracking. This method of imposing educational and career paths upon students at young ages relies on various factors such as class and status to reinforce socioeconomic differences. Children tend to be placed on tracks guiding them towards socioeconomic occupations similar to that of their parents, without real considerations for their strengths and weaknesses. As students advance through the educational system, they follow along their tracks by completing the predetermined courses. This is one of the main factors limiting social mobility in America today.
Read more about this topic: Hidden Curriculum
Famous quotes containing the words higher, education and/or tracking:
“Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it—an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)