It is a simple point that what is taught is not the same as what
the students learn, but it does have a number of implications.
In the figure above, it is clear that some of what we teach is
wasted effort: but the diagram is a representation of only one learner’s
learning. It may be that within a class as a whole, everything we teach is
learned, by someone. The shape representing the teaching is smaller than that
for learning, because students are also learning from other sources, including
colleagues and the sheer experience of being in the educational system, as well
as more conventional other resources such as books.
It is an open question in any given case as to whether what they
learn apart from what they are taught is a "good" thing or not. It
includes the “hidden curriculum”, which is a phrase used by Snyder (1971)
to describe what students learn by default in educational settings. His
original observations at MIT in the late 'fifties were about how students with
an over-loaded curriculum acquired survival tactics to get through their
courses, such as mugging up only the parts which were likely to come up in the
exams, and thus losing the point of much of the teaching. This selective
learning is one of the characteristics of what is now called "surface learning",
although that tends to be seen as an attribute of the learner — Snyder saw it
as a problem of the institution.
From a sociological (Marxist) rather than primarily educational
perspective, Bowles and Gintis (1976) suggested that all US schooling has a
hidden curriculum dictated by the demands of a capitalist economy. More
recently, critical theorists have sought to expose the hidden assumptions
behind curricula (see, for example, Collins (1991)
— see also Cultural
Considerations). Some of the work seems marginal and academically
political, but there is no denying that teachers' strategies, such as
labelling, can have a profound effect on a student's experience. Claxton (1996)
has convincingly argued that adult learning is profoundly influenced by
“implicit theories of learning” acquired at school, and that teachers tend to
reproduce their implicit models in the ways in which they themselves go on to
teach.