The Unspoken Curriculum: How School Shapes Our Idea of a Good Life

“She had so much potential.”

“What happened to her?”

These questions often surface quietly at reunions or scroll gently through LinkedIn feeds, often with curiosity and occasionally masquerading judgement. For many who attended high-achieving schools (particularly girls’ grammar or selective schools), there can be a subtle but persistent feeling of shame when life doesn’t unfold along a straight, upward path - or rather a quiet sense of tension between who we were told we could become and who we actually are.

This is not just about individual disappointment. It reflects a deeper and more enduring truth: educational environments do teach knowledge and skills, but perhaps more importantly, they teach narratives. And these narratives shape how we come to understand success, worth and what a “good life” is supposed to look like. Understanding these narratives, and giving ourselves permission to reshape them, is part of each of our on-going work of “becoming”.

The Hidden Curriculum of Aspiration

Selective schools, especially grammar schools for girls, often pride themselves on academic rigour and opportunity, while also transmitting powerful social messages, many of which are unspoken.

In these environments, students are taught to work hard, achieve and to become a certain kind of person: articulate, diligent, self-managing and aspirational. The goal is often framed as “potential fulfilled,” with an implicit vision of success that includes professional status, public respectability, financial security and personal poise.

At girls’ grammar schools in particular, this curriculum often includes a distinctly gendered story:

• Succeed, but gracefully.

• Be ambitious, but likeable.

• Excel, but don’t disrupt (too much). 

Crucially, these narratives are often unconscious. They’re not necessarily spoken or formalised, but absorbed over time, through praise, policy, comparison, tradition and silence. Students internalise what kinds of futures are admired, which behaviours are rewarded and which kinds of visibility are quietly discouraged.

Alternative Stories: When Education Becomes Liberation

Almost a decade after leaving that kind of school myself, I returned to the classroom - this time at a non-selective girls’ school in East London serving a student population with over two thirds of students qualifying for Pupil Premium support. The ethos there was radically different.

This school did not ask girls to shrink into neat, acceptable forms of success. It encouraged them to step into their voices. Students were taught to speak up, to question power, to see themselves as public thinkers and future leaders. Former pupils—many now visible figures in politics, law and activism—returned as role models. Instead of abstract; leadership was local, lived and embodied.

This embodiment of leadership was not incidental but rather built through sustained, thoughtful design:

• A Model United Nations programme where students researched and debated global issues with authority and skill;

• A Global Girl Leading initiative that explored themes of democracy, leadership and activism, rooted in their lived experiences;

• Deep, longstanding relationships with families and communities, making engagement authentic and reciprocal—not symbolic.

As Bell Hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress:

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

This school embraced that radical potential. Classrooms were places where young women practiced power and the hidden curriculum said: you are here to challenge, to lead and to be heard.

But it is also important to acknowledge that these opportunities, while inspiring, were not always universal. In practice, the most visible and prestigious leadership pathways were often made available to the already high-achieving students: confident, articulate and academically successful. Those who were struggling—emotionally, socially or academically—were less likely to access these spaces or to see themselves reflected in them

The school’s ethos may have championed empowerment, but the structures of opportunity still unfortunately favoured the few.

A Return to Compliance

More recently, I taught in another non-selective girls’ school whereby the contrast was stark. There, the emphasis developed into control, compliance and unquestioned authority. Challenging systems was discouraged. The atmosphere echoed the silent expectations I remembered from my own school days: be impressive, but don’t be inconvenient.

And yet, this was also a school where many girls were visibly and vocally struggling—with school and often with life beyond it. Their frustration was not contained; it surfaced in the corridors, in lessons and in the culture itself. Their voices, resistant and unsettled, were often the loudest in the room.

These were not curated expressions of leadership, but rather unfiltered signals of pressure and unmet needs. And, in a space that prized obedience over openness, it was precisely these voices that defined the emotional climate of the school.

When challenge is suppressed, it does not disappear. It resurfaces; often with more urgency and fewer safe containers.

The Cost of a Narrow Script

The shame many people carry after leaving high-pressure school environments does not come from failing. It comes from failing to follow a script.

The internal message is: if you were once a “bright girl,” a future success story, then any deviation (however necessary or intentional) feels like falling short. Even if it leads to a more sustainable or meaningful life.

it can also be hard to question because so much of this scripting is absorbed rather than announced. As adults, we may not even realise that we’re still measuring our worth by a framework handed to us at 16.

Rethinking Potential, Reclaiming Meaning

The phrase “she had so much potential” often masquerades as concern, but functions as judgement. It assumes that potential is linear, fixed and measurable, rather than adaptive, relational and evolving.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us that a dignified life is not measured by output, but by the freedom to live according to one’s values. And Viktor Frankl argued that meaning—not achievement—is what truly sustains us through uncertainty.

A good life is therefore not built by meeting expectations, but by writing a story that makes sense to you, even if it doesn’t to others.

The Stories We Carry and the Ones We Write

Educational institutions leave long shadows. They shape how we speak to ourselves, how we compare our lives to others and how we interpret challenge, pause or change.

Some schools teach students to blend in, while others teach them to speak out. Some teach that excellence means obedience, whereas others teach that it means action.

However, even in schools that centre voice and leadership, we must ask: Whose voices are actually invited? Whose leadership is nurtured?

Often, the young people who are most visible in these spaces are those who already show signs of “success” - confidence, academic strength or social fluency. Those whose struggles are more intense, quieter or less polished can be left outside the narrative.

A truly empowering education listens for the unheard while also amplifying the exceptional. It builds systems that draw out and make space for the quiet, the angry and the unsure and sees them not as problems to fix, but as people to include.

The most radical classroom is not the one filled with future leaders. It is the one where each and every student learns that they are already worthy of being heard.

Further Reading & References

• Bell Hooks – Teaching to Transgress

• Carol Gilligan – In a Different Voice

• Brené Brown – The Gifts of Imperfection

• Martha Nussbaum – Creating Capabilities

• Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

• Erving Goffman – Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity