Ahead of GIHES 2026: From the Hidden Curriculum to a Holistic Curriculum

Bringing Education Out of Hiding

M. Tata Taufik

On September 5-6, 2026, educational leaders, academics, and pesantren administrators will gather in Jakarta for the Global Islamic Holistic Education Summit (GIHES). One word in the name of this forum immediately catches my attention: holistic. Long before the term became the theme of an international summit, the pesantren – Indonesia’s Islamic boarding school tradition – had already been practicing an educational life in which the boundary between classroom and everyday experience is remarkably thin.

So, ahead of GIHES, I would like to offer a small note that may be slightly unsettling: if we are serious about holistic education, perhaps it is time to shift the core of education from the hidden curriculum toward a holistic curriculum.

The term hidden curriculum did not emerge because educational scholars were running out of vocabulary. It emerged from a concern with what children actually experience in school.

In 1968, Philip W. Jackson published Life in Classrooms. He did not see the classroom merely as a place where teachers deliver lessons and students receive them. He saw the classroom as a form of life. Some children are active, while others keep waiting; some are frequently praised, while others are repeatedly corrected; some are fully engaged, while others gradually withdraw. They may sit in the same room, yet they do not necessarily experience the same education.

Schools are good at noticing the child who can answer questions. There are grades, rankings, test sheets, and measurable achievements. But what about the child who comes every day, causes no trouble, does not particularly stand out, is rarely called on, and almost never receives praise?

The child is present, but almost invisible.

Does that child learn nothing? Of course not. The child is learning – just perhaps not the lesson we are measuring.

The child learns when it is safe to speak and when silence is wiser. The child learns what it feels like to wait and not to be chosen. The child learns who receives attention, who holds power, which answers are rewarded, and which behaviors invite correction.

Jackson described classroom life through, among other things, the realities of crowds, praise, and power. Children are not only learning mathematics, language, or history. They are also learning how to live within a social structure called school.

This is where we encounter the hidden curriculum: a curriculum that is not written but learned; not listed on the timetable but experienced; not tested at the end of the semester but capable of leaving a lasting mark on the child.

Up to this point, I agree.

But after more than half a century of discussing it, I find myself asking a slightly mischievous question: if we already know there is a hidden curriculum, why do we keep allowing it to remain hidden? Once we know where it is hiding, perhaps we should stop hiding it.

Jackson helped us discover the curriculum that was hidden. The challenge for education today, in my view, is to stop leaving it there.

This is where I want to move the core of education from the hidden curriculum toward a holistic curriculum.

I am not saying that the concept of the hidden curriculum is wrong. Not at all. It has made a major contribution by reminding us that children do not learn only from what we teach. They learn from what they experience. But education cannot remain merely a detective’s job – discovering what is hidden. Education is also the work of design.

If the environment educates, the environment must be designed. If relationships educate, relationships must be attended to. If praise and correction educate, both must be managed with care. If experience is a teacher, students’ experiences can no longer be treated as a by-product of the formal curriculum.

Experience must be brought into the heart of the curriculum itself.

At this point, John P. Miller gives us a particularly useful vocabulary. Holistic education, in his account, seeks to develop the whole person: intellectually, emotionally, physically, socially, aesthetically, and even spiritually. His framework emphasizes three interrelated principles: balance, inclusion, and connection. In other words, education should not enlarge the head while leaving the heart, the body, social relationships, and inner life to develop on their own.

UNESCO describes a holistic approach to education as one that integrates emotional, social, physical, and cognitive growth. Across its curriculum and pedagogical approaches, UNESCO also encourages learning that moves beyond disciplinary fragmentation: interdisciplinary learning, project-based learning, and the linking of what happens in school to real life, communities, and global challenges.

And here comes the irony. We are often meticulous in designing learning to know, while learning to be and learning to live together are left largely to chance – in the dormitory, the dining hall, student organizations, the sports field, the queue, and even the bathroom. Yet these are often precisely the places where children learn how to become human beings.

That is what I mean by a holistic curriculum. I do not mean adding a new subject called ‘Holistic Curriculum.’ Please do not. Our students already have crowded schedules. What needs to be expanded is not the number of subjects, but our understanding of what counts as education.

And when this idea is brought into the pesantren, it becomes even more interesting.

A pesantren has something many schools do not: life itself. A santri – a resident student – does not arrive at seven in the morning and go home at two in the afternoon. The student lives within the educational system: waking there, sleeping there, eating there, praying there, studying there, making friends there, arguing there, reconciling there, falling ill there, laughing there, and sometimes crying there.

At one moment the santri learns to lead; at another, to be led.

If Jackson discovered the hidden curriculum by observing students’ lives in classrooms, I sometimes wonder: what if Jackson had spent a week in a pesantren?

Perhaps his book would no longer have been titled Life in Classrooms, but Life Everywhere.

In a pesantren, the classroom is only one educational space. The mosque educates. The dormitory educates. The sports field educates. Student organizations educate. The kitchen educates. Even the queue for the bathroom educates.

The way a kitchen distributes food may teach justice more effectively than an hour-long lesson on morality. The way an ustaz corrects a student may teach respect – or humiliation. The way a student leader treats a junior may teach leadership – or teach that power can be used however one wishes. The way friends care for a sick roommate teaches compassion without requiring a long definition.

The mosque speaks. The dormitory speaks. Even the bathroom speaks. Even when no one is giving a lecture, the system continues to send messages.

This is why I sometimes think education trusts words too much. We lecture about cleanliness while the environment remains dirty. We speak about discipline while teachers arrive late. We explain noble character while children witness uncontrolled anger.

Children end up receiving two curricula. One is recited to them. The other is performed before them. And, if I may say so, the performed curriculum is usually more powerful than the recited one.

That is why I become slightly nervous whenever I hear the slogan, ‘A pesantren educates twenty-four hours a day.’ It sounds wonderful in a brochure. But if a pesantren truly educates twenty-four hours a day, the statement is also a warning to those who run it. A failure in the system at ten o’clock at night is still part of the curriculum.

Seniority that turns into violence is a curriculum. A student leader who humiliates juniors is a curriculum. A teacher who demands discipline but is personally undisciplined is a curriculum. A child who receives attention only when achieving something is also receiving a curriculum.

If education takes place twenty-four hours a day, then for twenty-four hours a day the institution must be accountable for the messages produced by its system.

In the digital age, the problem becomes even more complicated. We still sometimes treat children as if they were hard drives: teachers send data, examinations check how much of the file was successfully stored, and the child who stores the most is called intelligent. The one who does not is sent for remediation.

But once class ends, the child returns to the screen. A teacher may speak about moral character for one hour. The algorithm works for six.

YouTube, TikTok, games, influencers, search engines, artificial intelligence, and chat groups now participate in educating children. They do not appear on the school’s organizational chart, have no employee identification numbers, and never attend faculty meetings. But they are working.

Then, when something emerges that we do not like, we ask, ‘What is wrong with children today?’ Perhaps the question should be reversed: what kind of person is our educational ecosystem shaping them to become?

That question, for me, lies at the heart of the holistic curriculum. Education cannot stop at asking, What have we taught? It must also ask: What has the child experienced? What has the child seen and heard? Who serves as a model? How are the weak treated? Is the child allowed to ask questions? Does a mistake become an opportunity to learn, or merely a reason to punish?

All of that is curriculum.

In Islamic education, this issue is even more important. We do not educate human beings merely so that they know. Knowledge is expected to move into awareness, faith, action, habit, character, social responsibility, and eventually to give shape to our life together. If a process this large is entrusted only to school subjects, we may be asking too much of the timetable.

This is precisely where the pesantren has a major opportunity. It does not need to chase modern schooling by becoming increasingly similar to modern schools. It already possesses educational resources of its own: shared life, living examples, habituation, congregational worship, close relationships with teachers, student organization, independence, service, adab – ethical and spiritual cultivation – and the texture of everyday experience.

GIHES, then, will become much more interesting if the word holistic does not remain merely the theme of a summit. It needs to become a way of seeing the curriculum, managing the pesantren, treating students, and evaluating educational success.

Educational experience should no longer be left as hidden curriculum. Map it. Design it. Manage it. Evaluate it. Take responsibility for it.

Perhaps the problem with our education is not that we lack curricula. We already have too many of them. What we lack is the courage to acknowledge that life itself is curriculum.

If so, let us stop hiding it. Let us make it holistic, intentional, and accountable.

A child may forget what we taught, but it is much harder to forget how we treated them.

M. Tata Taufik is a writer and scholar of Islamic communication and education.