The chilling ‘hidden curriculum’ of Louisiana’s new Ten Commandments law

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry at the start of the special session in the House Chamber, Jan. 15, 2024, in Baton Rouge, La.

On June 19, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed House Bill 71 into law. Beginning next year, the new law will require all elementary and secondary schools and universities that receive state funding to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The law also requires that commandment displays include text explaining how studying the Ten Commandments has a long history in American public education. No school or university must spend funds creating these displays; they can accept monetary donations or the displays themselves to comply with the new mandate.

Louisiana has become the first state in the country to require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in the classroom since the Supreme Court declared such a requirement unconstitutional more than 40 years ago. The legal question that looms over this entire issue is whether mandating the Ten Commandments be hung in a classroom violates the Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from taking any action to establish a state religion or show favoritism to any religion or nonreligion. While that is a crucial question, my worry is more with the impact of this law on education and the broader cultural clash over civic morality. As a curriculum theorist, I look at this law with grave concern.

In the United States, the educational debate about what to teach students about morality — and the inevitable follow-up question of “Which moral code should we teach?” — goes all the way back to Puritan New England. These are fundamental questions because, as HB 71’s text states that the bill recognizes “the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government.”

Few areas of curriculum creation are more fraught than civic morality. Not only does it inevitably run into the constitutional issues laid out above, but everyone recognizes that teaching a moral code in a classroom, regardless of whether it is secularly or religiously grounded, can have a lasting impact on students through the “hidden curriculum” that it will inevitably create.

The hidden curriculum are the lessons taught implicitly through the formal curriculum, school policies and laws imposed on schools by the state. As I have written before, much of what we learn about the world and our place in it is taught through the hidden curriculum. An example of the hidden curriculum would be which religions have documents and symbols on classroom walls in a given school, which ones do not, and what this tells students of all religions and no religions how their school values their religious background. It will be impossible for students attending public elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions to be unaware of the displays hanging in the classrooms with the State government’s endorsement.

HB 71's hidden curriculum raises concerns about its impact on the learning environment. Because the mandated list of commandments in HB 71 differs from the Jewish Ten Commandments, this may be viewed as the state endorsing Christianity over other religions. Furthermore, the Commandments listed in HB 71 include “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images” — text absent from the Ten Commandments listed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. That may also be interpreted as the state endorsing a specifically Protestant theology in a state that is roughly one-quarter Catholic. Historically, this sort of denominational clash over what versions of a religious text or prayer should be used in public schools was one of the main drivers for creating the Catholic school system in the U.S.

Does this law amount to the state proselytizing Christianity to students? Some will point out that the country has largely moved past the Christian denominational clashes that were once common in American life. But while this may be true, it has no bearing on whether a Christian student feels that this specific listing amounts to the state evangelizing a particular Christian denomination to them. And not every public school student is Christian or practices a religion.

In that sense, HB 71 raises serious questions about First Amendment rights and multicultural education concerns. Multicultural education assumes schools embrace all kinds of diversity, including religious diversity. A hidden curriculum question raised by HB 71 is whether, as a matter of civic morality, hanging the Ten Commandments in a classroom contradicts public educational institutions’ responsibility to embrace all forms of diversity. How will atheist, agnostic or Hindu students interpret a state-mandated display that says, “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me?” It makes sense that some of these students will see any learning environment that posts a theological document in such a prominent position as actively seeking to convert them. They may interpret such an environment and the hidden civil morality curriculum of HB 71 as hostile.

As I write this essay, civil liberties groups have already filed a lawsuit seeking to stop HB 71 from going into effect. In the past, laws like HB 71 would lose in federal court, all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. But given the current composition of the high court, it is impossible to speculate how the justices would rule if and when this case finally arrives before them. Regardless of how HB 71 fares in court, this issue is not going away. These clashes will only intensify as the active factions in the culture war battle over who writes the curriculum of our country’s civic morality.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com