Teachers and Schools as Agencies of Values Education: reflections on teachers’ perceptions Part Two: the hidden curriculum

Abstract

This is the second of a two‐part survey of a project conducted over a two‐year period with teachers in Scottish schools with support from the Gordon Cook Foundation. In the first part of this article it was concluded that the difficulties which teachers encountered in the course of their attempts to conceptualise a satisfactory alternative view of the moral role of the teacher to those ofpaternalism andliberalism may have stemmed from rather uncritical subscription to a crude ethics of consensus inadequate to address certain higher‐order questions and issues of ethical and educational principle. In this second part, it is argued that broadly analogous consensualist assumptions about the nature of moral life were the source of similarly unsatisfactory attempts to deal with problems about the hidden curriculum.