The Hidden Curriculum

On the lessons we inherit without knowing, and the ones we choose from here.

From the moment we arrive, we are being shaped.
By the people who hold us.
By the people who don’t.
By the words spoken aloud and the ones that live under the floorboards.
By the fears, hopes, and unfinished stories of the adults who set our weather.

We don’t begin as blank clay.
We come with a seed already forming — particular, mysterious, on its way somewhere.
But that seed grows inside a climate.
The way we were held (or not held).
The rules of love and anger we absorbed.
The versions of “good” and “bad” we were taught to perform.
All of this becomes the early landscape of our becoming.

The lessons nobody writes on the board

I first heard the phrase hidden curriculum at university, in a lecture theatre on a hill overlooking the city.
Back then, the conversation was political: what gets included in a syllabus, what gets left out, and how silence is never neutral.
If you never teach a poem by a Black poet, you are teaching something.
If certain voices never appear on the page, you are teaching something.

The hidden curriculum, they said, is everything students learn that never appears in the course outline:
how you look at them;
what you laugh at;
which questions you reward and which you shut down;
whether you apologise when you’re wrong;
how you talk about those who aren’t in the room.

At eighteen, I understood the theory.
It took much longer to understand the life part.

Because the most powerful lessons we learn aren’t the ones anyone planned.
They are the ones we absorb from how the people around us live.

Children learn from what we are — long before they have language for any of it.
They copy how we speak to the cashier.
They hear how we talk about neighbours when the door closes.
They watch what we do with anger, shame, disappointment — whether we shut down, lash out, numb, dramatise, or breathe and try again.

We can say “You are loved” a hundred times a week.
But if the hidden curriculum says:
You’re only safe when I’m calm,
or
Your feelings are too much,
or
Kindness means never telling the truth if it might upset someone,
that is the lesson that sinks deepest into their bones.

When the blueprint goes invisible

Leaving the city was, in its own way, an early attempt to rewrite my blueprint — though at the time I believed I was simply interpreting it more accurately.
The move to the farm was another chapter in the same story.
Some quiet part of me was already reaching for a different way to live — a way that felt truer in my body, steadier in my days, even if I couldn’t yet name it.

In recent years, as our family stepped into a long season marked by uncertainty and sudden loss, this truth stopped being theoretical.
People would ask how I was coping, and without thinking, I would say:
“I’m fine. I’ve got this. My mom left me the blueprint. I know exactly what’s coming and what I have to do.”

And in one sense, I meant it.
I had watched her walk through crisis and the thousand practical things you must do when life collapses.
She was competent, steady, unflinching.
Those were strong, necessary lessons.

But they were also the hidden curriculum.
Alongside strength, I had absorbed:
You cope.
You carry the load.
You don’t fall apart in public.
You know what to do.

There is dignity in that.
There is also a cost.
Because if coping is the only lesson, there isn’t much room left for
This is too much,
or
I need help,
or
I don’t know what I’m doing.

And this is where many of us quietly find ourselves:
walking around inside a blueprint we didn’t know we were following,
still running strategies that began as someone else’s survival,
still performing the old patterns we once learned to endure — patterns that no longer fit the life we’re actually living.

After childhood, the syllabus is ours

Up to a point, who we become truly isn’t our fault.
We didn’t choose our parents, our culture, the emotional weather of our childhood home.
We didn’t choose what was feared, avoided, praised, punished, or called “normal.”

We begin life memorising a blueprint we never consciously agreed to.
We study it without realising we’re studying.
We inherit its tone, its posture, its rules for being someone in the world.
And for a long time, it works well enough — or at least, we believe it must.

But at some stage — eighteen, twenty-one, or perhaps the first time we realise I can’t keep blaming them for everything, or this way of living simply isn’t working for me anymore — the work shifts.
We move from repeating the blueprint to quietly questioning it.
And that is where becoming really begins.

We start to see the old curriculum for what it is:
not a destiny,
but a beginning.

For years, I believed I had already taken responsibility for my life.
What I didn’t realise was that I had taken responsibility inside the blueprint I inherited.
I worked hard.
I behaved — sort of.
I became competent.
I perfected the mould, at least as I understood it.

What I hadn’t yet learned to ask was:
Who am I, underneath all this shaping?
Which parts of me are true, and which are simply strategies that worked — behaviours I learned because they were praised, safe, or “correct”?
What kind of human being do I actually want to become — not by society’s definition of “successful,” but by the quiet standard inside?

This, to me, is the heart of the Art of Becoming.
We begin to rewrite the curriculum — first for ourselves.
And then, inevitably, for anyone who happens to be watching.

Because whether we mean to or not, we are always learning and always teaching.

When we avoid a difficult conversation and call it kindness —
that is curriculum.
When we explode and justify it because someone “pushed us too far” —
that is curriculum.
When we apologise for things that aren’t ours, or rescue people from consequences they need to meet —
that becomes the lesson, whether we intend it or not.

The point is not guilt.
The point is sight.

A small beginning: one situation, one shift

So maybe the invitation this week is gentle and specific:

Think of one situation that keeps tugging at you — a familiar ache, a repeated argument, a relationship where you feel yourself slipping into old survival patterns: the good girl performance, the peacekeeper, the rescuer, the reliable one, the quiet martyr.

Ask yourself:
What is the hidden curriculum here?
What am I teaching myself — and quietly teaching others — simply by the way I show up?

And then choose something very small:
one truth told instead of a polite half-lie;
one boundary held instead of quietly dropped;
one moment of saying “I need help,” where you would usually say “I’m fine.”

Tiny actions.
New curriculum.

We cannot go back and rewrite our earliest lessons.
We cannot un-hear what was said or un-feel what was missing.

But we can begin to change the climate we live in now — for ourselves, and for anyone within our orbit.

That is part of becoming:
not sculpting ourselves into what the world says we should be,
but becoming someone we can trust to live a real life well —
and someone whose way of living is beginning to embody what we actually believe.