What Children and Teachers Learn Before Instruction Begins
- Karyn Allee
- Jan 7
- 4 min read
Why Mattering Is the Quiet Curriculum of Schools
The Messages We Don’t Mean to Send
Long before a lesson begins—before standards, objectives, or assessments—children and teachers are already learning something. They are learning whether they are seen. Whether their questions matter. Whether their time, ideas, and relationships are valued—or treated as obstacles to efficiency.
These lessons are rarely named. They are communicated through pacing, priorities, routines, and what schools choose to protect—or sacrifice—when pressures mount. Educators have long referred to this as the hidden curriculum—the powerful set of messages people absorb simply by participating in an institution.
What makes these messages especially consequential is that they are not framed as instruction at all. They are ambient. And because they are ambient, they are often unquestioned.
What Do We Mean by “Mattering”?
In developmental science, mattering is not about self-esteem or feeling special. It is about something more fundamental: the experience of being noticed, responded to, and taken seriously within relationships and systems.
The concept of mattering in early childhood has been articulated clearly in recent work from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. This work emphasizes that development is shaped through serve-and-return interactions—patterns of responsiveness that communicate, again and again, you are worth responding to.
What is often left unsaid—but is just as important—is that mattering is not communicated only through individual relationships. It is also communicated through structures, expectations, and environments. Systems teach, too.
Environment as Message: What Surrounds Us Shapes Us
Development does not happen in a vacuum. What surrounds us shapes us—including the physical spaces children and educators occupy, the schedules they are held to, and the policies that govern their work.
Research synthesized by the Harvard Center shows that environments influence stress responses, engagement, and relational health—all of which shape how safe it feels to learn and to teach.
Complementing this work, interdisciplinary research from the Stanford Center on Early Childhood highlights how systems-level conditions—instability, surveillance, lack of trust—function as developmental inputs, not background noise.
Projects like the RAPID Survey Project capture how families (and educators by extension) experience these systems in real time, particularly during periods of uncertainty and strain.
Taken together, this work reinforces a simple but uncomfortable truth: environments teach, whether or not we intend them to.
When Play Is Removed, Something Else Is Taught
This is where conversations about play become about far more than pedagogy.
When play is marginalized, shortened, or treated as expendable, the message children receive is not simply about how they are expected to learn. It is about which forms of curiosity count, which ways of knowing are legitimate, and whose rhythms matter.
At JLC, we have written previously about the urgency of returning to play in US schools and about how policy can support—or constrain—play-based learning. Viewed through a mattering lens, these arguments deepen.
Removing play is not neutral. It communicates that efficiency outranks exploration, that compliance is safer than curiosity, and that joy is a luxury rather than a signal of safety and belonging.
Teachers learn alongside children in these moments. They learn whether their professional judgment is trusted—or whether it is something to be managed.
Policy as a Mattering System
Policy debates are often framed as technical: questions of alignment, outcomes, or accountability. But policy also functions as a mattering system. It communicates who is trusted, whose expertise counts, and whose needs are considered negotiable.
The messages that shape mattering are not limited to curriculum or classroom practice. They show up in compensation structures, eroded professional autonomy, lack of accountability when systems fail, and the persistent framing of educators and learners as problems to be fixed rather than partners to be trusted.
These are not isolated issues. They are patterns. And patterns teach.
When Efficiency Replaces Relationship
Concerns about technology—especially artificial intelligence—are often framed as fears about novelty or speed. But the deeper issue is not technology itself. It is what happens when efficiency begins to replace responsiveness.
In a widely circulated opinion piece, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek warns about AI replacing responsive caregiving, not because technology is inherently harmful, but because automated substitutes cannot replicate the relational conditions children’s brains depend on.
This concern extends well beyond early childhood—and well beyond AI. Whenever systems prioritize scale, speed, or control over relationship, they risk communicating an anti-mattering message: you are interchangeable; your presence is optional.
The JLC Position: Play, Joy, and Agency as Mattering Practices
At JLC, we are not neutral about these questions.
Play is not an indulgence. It is a public affirmation that children’s ways of making sense of the world matter. Joy is not a distraction from learning; it is often a signal that learning environments feel safe enough for risk-taking. Agency is not chaos; it is an acknowledgment of personhood.
When schools protect play, honor professional judgment, and design environments that invite participation rather than compliance, they are doing more than improving instruction.
They are communicating mattering—intentionally.
Naming the Stakes
Whether we acknowledge it or not, schools are always teaching something before instruction begins. Children and teachers are always learning how much they matter, who holds power, and what kinds of engagement are welcomed.
The question is not whether these lessons are being taught. The question is whether we are willing to notice them—and to take responsibility for the messages our systems send.
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