The Hidden Curriculum of Success, Part 2: The Strange Resistance to Honesty
The Hidden Cost of Belonging: When Students Learn to Perform Instead of Reflect
At the end of Part I, we arrived at what should be an empowering realization: when students stop performing and start listening, their writing improves, not just stylistically, but morally and intellectually, because they stop manufacturing answers and start discovering meaning.
And yet, in practice, this kind of writing is rare.
That’s the paradox: students want to be honest. They want to say something real. But when they sit down to write (especially in high-stakes contexts like a fellowship application), they default to performance: they lead with credentials, smooth over contradictions, and reach for language that sounds impressive instead of saying what they actually mean. Even when invited to reflect, many feel compelled to sell.
This mindset isn’t just about habit—it’s about survival. When thousands of dollars are on the line, whether in the form of a prestigious, life-changing fellowship or a desperately-needed merit scholarship, students understandably fall back on what they think “works.” Vulnerability feels like a luxury for later, after the application is in, after the degree is secured. Now is not the time to experiment with new ways of thinking or speaking. Now is the time to sound serious. Safe. Professional. And so, even the most thoughtful students learn to treat writing not as discovery, but as performance, something to be managed, optimized, and defended.
I see this performative pressure long before the writing even begins. I’ll ask a student why she pursued a series of impressive research opportunities, and get a blank stare. I press another student on his motivations for running for student government, or ask why he’s declared a third major, or what volunteering at a refugee health clinic has to do with his long-term goal of becoming a zookeeper, and get vague, hesitant replies. Nobody has ever questioned the value of their achievements. Aspiring to a career as a doctor or a lawyer keeps the folks back home happy and proud, and nobody ever questions these claims.
But when you start to press, the truth comes into focus: these narratives are as thin as eggshells.
Ol’ Socrates had the audacity to propose that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, and when I ask students to examine the lives they’ve been living, many struggle to connect the dots. Too often, they’re narrating a résumé as they move through the world. Their choices aren’t guided by conviction or clarity, but by the quiet pressure to accumulate. I sometimes call it the “hand out the car window” approach to college: you just stick your arm out and grab whatever flies by. How it all assembles into a sensible narrative is beside the point.
Don’t get me wrong - I am not poo-pooing exploration for exploration’s sake. Trying out new and different things is a vital part of education (and of growing up). But when the experiences and accolades are arbitrary or disconnected, it becomes difficult to form a coherent sense of self. And when students finally sit down to write about who they are and what they believe, they often find they don’t know. Not because they’re unreflective, but because the system hasn’t given them time, or permission, to reflect.
This resistance to honest writing, then, isn’t just a matter of mindset–they’re “institutionalized.” Students are not simply choosing to perform; they’re being trained to do so. Over time, they absorb the lesson, through rubrics, recommendations, classroom norms, and institutional rewards, that performance is the only safe option. It’s not enough to be curious or sincere; you have to be a “leader.”
When they sit down to draft a personal statement, many students are operating from an internalized, systemic framework that limits the possibilities of what they can say and how they can say it. They aren’t being evasive on purpose; they just don’t have any concept of the alternative.
But where do those rules come from? What, exactly, is being taught beneath the surface?
What Schools Really Teach
At the risk of sounding like a radical (as well, I acknowledge that it is perhaps too late), I consider schools to be, in the words of our dear friend Louis Althusser, ideological state apparatuses. In other words, they do not exist solely to educate: their true function is to teach conformity and to train students to internalize and reproduce dominant social norms. So what gets labeled as “professionalism” or “clarity” or “leadership” often reflects institutional preferences, ways of speaking and being that align with the values of those already in power.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu helps us understand how this training operates on the ground. He called it cultural capital: the unwritten habits, styles, and forms of expression that mark someone as a “good fit” within a system. It’s not just about what you know—it’s about how fluently you perform that knowledge in the institution’s preferred language.
We’ve already invoked Socrates, so we might as well call in Plato. For years, I taught the Allegory of the Cave to first-year students at a public university in New Orleans. It was usually one of the first things I would have them read, and my intention was to use Plato’s parable to help them frame the college experience as a kind of awakening and welcome idea that education is often uncomfortable, even disorienting, but ultimately freeing. Yes, it may separate you from the world you once knew. Yes, it may make you feel like a stranger to your past. But the point wasn’t to reject that past, it was to return to it with new tools, new language, and, above all, a responsibility to help others escape the cave of ignorance and oppression.
Over time, though, I began to see something else in the allegory. The other prisoners in the cave (the ones watching shadows on the wall) don’t think of themselves as ignorant. In fact, they congratulate each other on how quickly and accurately they can identify the shadow shapes projected on the wall. By the standards of their world, they are intelligent and capable people, and from their perspective, the enlightened person isn’t wise, they’re disoriented, slow, and incoherent.
In other words, the door swings both ways. What counts as knowledge, fluency, or intelligence— is always relative to the system you’re in. (Or, as Burt Reynolds phrased it in the masterwork of cinema, Smokey and the Bandit (1977), “When you tell somebody somethin', it depends on what part of the country you're standin' in... as to just how dumb you are.”)
Recognizing this relativism, that what counts as intelligence or legitimacy depends on the system you’re in, revealed a deeper danger in even the most well-meaning models of education: the assumption that there is only one direction out of the cave. That enlightenment moves in a straight line, away from ignorance, toward the institution.
But what if the shadows weren’t just illusions? What if they were a different kind of knowledge, coded differently, spoken in a different register, no less real? Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences reminds us that intelligence isn’t singular or hierarchical. A student may be spatially gifted, musically attuned, or interpersonally brilliant, but if those gifts aren’t legible within the dominant academic framework, they often go unrecognized, or are mistaken for lack.
Once again, for the people in the back: the problem isn’t that students don’t know how to think, it’s that their thinking doesn’t always align with what institutions are trained to reward. And the longer they spend in those institutions, the more fluently they learn to speak its language, until they begin to believe it’s the only language that matters.Over time, those performances become internalized. They form what Bourdieu called a habitus: a way of seeing and being in the world that feels natural, even when it’s been carefully trained.
In elite academic spaces, this often means learning to speak with polished ease, to hide uncertainty behind confidence, to present linear narratives of growth and leadership, even when your real life looks nothing like that. These are not universal instincts. They’re social performances, coded, practiced, and rewarded.
To make matters worse, these expectations don’t land evenly. As Nicole Stephens, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, has shown, many students enter higher education with different models of selfhood, often shaped by interdependent cultural contexts. First-generation college students, working-class students, and those from immigrant or collectivist backgrounds tend to emphasize humility, obligation, and shared purpose over individual distinction or self-promotion.
But the norms of elite education often reward the opposite. In a widely cited series of studies, Stephens and her colleagues found that most U.S. universities operate around what they call an independent model of self—a cultural ideal that values assertiveness, personal achievement, and individual narrative. Students who don’t conform to this ideal aren’t failing to perform, they’re performing a different value system. And too often, that system is misread as deficient.
In my work with fellowship applicants, I’ve seen this mismatch play out again and again. A young woman raised in a border town who helped run her family’s convenience store after school wasn’t sure how to frame her experiences as leadership. A young man from the rural Midwest, about to become the first in three generations of his family to travel outside the United States, struggled to position that fact as meaningful rather than incidental. One student was caring for a chronically ill parent while raising her younger siblings, all while excelling in school and volunteering on political campaigns—yet hesitated to claim any of it as noteworthy. A Native American student, having run out of money and failed out of college, returned home to work as a 911 dispatcher on the reservation while finishing his degree online. These students weren’t short on character, discipline, or insight. But they had been taught, by family, community, and experience, to stay humble, to put others first, and to do the work without expecting applause.
The point here is that the hidden curriculum, is not hidden from everyone. It’s most invisible to those outside the cultural center of the institution—those who haven’t been taught how to sound like they belong. Their own forms of cultural capital go unrecognized or, worse, are subtly devalued. And when asked to “reflect,” many instinctively code-switch or flatten themselves. They attempt to translate rich, complex life experiences into the polished idioms of institutional legitimacy that their peers demonstrate with ease.
Over time, this system doesn’t just shape opportunity, it shapes expression. Even students with powerful, complicated stories often struggle to tell them, not because they lack insight, but because they’ve learned to filter that insight through the institution’s preferred forms. The result is writing that conforms before it reveals.
The Performance Reflex
By the time students sit down to write a personal statement, the performance reflex is already deeply ingrained. And as I suggested earlier, the most difficult part of this “honesty problem” is that the students aren’t usually even aware that they’ve learned to anticipate and embody institutional expectations automatically. The polished tone, the strategic name-dropping, the curated humility followed by a tidy moral lesson - these moves don’t feel manipulative; they feel normal, natural, or safe.
These tropes are what happens when reflection becomes subordinated to impression management. Even in genres that invite vulnerability, students instinctively reach for language that signals maturity, confidence, and purpose. They edit out the messy parts and default to the story that “makes sense,” even when the real story is more complex, uncertain, or unresolved.
You can see the performance reflex in the patterns. There’s the tidy origin story: “Ever since I was five years old…” There’s the dramatic cold open: “There I was, standing at the edge of the operating table…” There’s the résumé in paragraph form, a careful arrangement of research, service, and leadership, lined up like trophies on a shelf. And then, the inevitable conclusion: a reaffirmation of purpose, values, or identity, just vague enough to sound universal. These essays hit all the expected beats. They are clean, competent, and strangely empty.
What they reflect, more than anything, is what Lynn Z. Bloom calls “good enough writing”—the institutional standard of pragmatic, grade-B prose that values clarity, modesty, punctuality, and conventional form. These academic virtues are not unimportant, but when they become the ceiling rather than the floor, they discourage experimentation and flatten complexity. Students learn to write essays that are efficient and decorous—but not necessarily alive with voice, insight, or discovery.
At the other end of the spectrum are students who haven’t been trained in that institutional language—first-generation students, working-class students, international students, or those from marginalized communities. Their essays often sound cautious, uncertain, overly formal or self-effacing. They flatten their voices, erase what makes them distinctive, and retreat into generic phrasing—afraid to take up too much space or draw the wrong kind of attention. They could play the notes with feeling, but no one told them they were allowed to.
And just when students begin to feel this tension, we offer what sounds like a solution.
The Authenticity Trap
Well-meaning educators like myself, the enlightened ones who can recognize students who are caught in the gears of the machine, will often advise, just be authentic.
We say it like it’s a cure, like it’s easy, like it’s an idea that had never before occurred to the student.
But by the time students reach this point, “authenticity” can feel less like an invitation and more like another expectation to manage. Some respond by engaging in performative authenticity (a well-placed hardship, a challenge overcome, an inspiring, hopeful look forward) because they believe that’s what will be rewarded. Others, who might actually have a deeper or more complex story, hesitate. They may fear that saying too much will make them look unstable, ungrateful, or unprofessional. But they may also fear something else: being seen as a “sympathy case,” as though their success were the result of circumstance rather than character, or as though their story belonged more to the institution than to themselves. The paradox is that the students most capable of telling a powerful, honest story are often the least confident they’re allowed to do so, and the most wary of how that story might be used.
The emotional and epistemological toll of the authenticity trap is hard to overstate. Students who’ve been taught to suppress their difference are suddenly told to “share their story”—but under evaluative pressure and with little guidance. Vulnerability stops feeling like an invitation and starts feeling like a test: How much of yourself are you willing to offer? What are you willing to sacrifice in exchange for credibility?
Some students, sensing what the institution rewards, engage in what’s often called the “trauma dump”—a rushed and emotionally raw narrative of suffering, presented without context or resolution. Others, wary of being misread or reduced, go quiet. They gesture toward complexity but retreat to abstraction or safe, résumé-like phrasing—not because they lack reflection, but because they’ve learned that honesty can backfire.
This pressure is especially acute for students from marginalized backgrounds, who are often told—sometimes explicitly—that their pain can help them stand out. In his New York Times essay “When I Applied to College, I Didn’t Want to ‘Sell My Pain,’” Elijah Megginson reflects on this experience:
In my life, I’ve had a lot of unfortunate experiences. So when it came time for me to write my personal statement for college applications, I knew that I could sell a story about all the struggles I had overcome. Each draft I wrote had a different topic. The first was about growing up without my dad being involved, the second was about the many times my life was violently threatened, the third was about coping with anxiety and PTSD, and the rest followed the same theme.
Megginson discarded draft after draft, because it felt like he was just trying to gain pity. He knew that what he had already overcome in his life was remarkable, but he began to wonder–is that all I have to offer? Resilience?”
He spoke to mentors and peers, who echoed his feelings. One teacher spoke of the pressure to “sell trauma with scholarship dollar signs behind it.” A friend who wrote about homelessness said she felt “sort of programmed [afterward] to think of myself as less-than, as inferior.” Each had struggled with the same sensations - that there was a “Goldilocks zone” for their trauma, where it was just the right amount to impress the reader, but not so much that it overwhelmed the narrative.
Ultimately, Megginson chose to write about his values:
At the time, my mom, a part-time health aide, was taking care of a patient who used a wheelchair. My mom was sometimes unable to pick him up at the bus stop, as she was just getting off her second job, so I took on that responsibility.
I would wait for her patient at the bus stop. I would make sure he ate, and I would play music for him until my mom got home. I also wrote about my relationship with my middle school janitor. I used both of these stories to show the importance of diversity and the value of respecting everyone regardless of physical ability, status or class. After writing this, there weren’t any feelings of regret. I felt free.
Megginson’s story captures the heart of the authenticity trap: the unspoken pressure to render one’s trauma legible, strategic, and redemptive. For many students, the challenge isn’t whether their experiences are real—it’s whether they can shape them into a story that feels both powerful and palatable. Too little adversity, and they risk being overlooked. Too much, and they fear being reduced to it. And while this bind is particularly acute for students of color and those from working-class backgrounds, it reveals a broader truth about the genre itself.
It’s not just students from marginalized backgrounds who struggle with the “challenge” script. I’ve worked with students from affluent, stable families—those whose lives have been carefully engineered for success—who quietly confess that they don’t know what to write about. They haven’t faced adversity in the conventional sense. Their parents removed every obstacle, cleared every path. “My life has been...kind of fine,” one student told me, almost apologetically, as though stability were a disqualifier. The anxiety isn’t just that they have nothing to say—it’s that they suspect the system only values a certain kind of story.
And then there are students at the other end of the spectrum—those who know exactly what the system wants, and resent it. They’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that to be competitive, they need to be more than just “excellent.” They need to be exceptional in the right ways: near-perfect grades, standout leadership, and survival of something harrowing. They understand that overcoming adversity has become part of the admissions aesthetic—and they know how to play the part. But they also know the cost. Many write with a simmering awareness that their stories aren’t being heard as testimony, but consumed as spectacle—as proof that the system works, that meritocracy is real, that talent rises. They’re not confused about the script. They’re exhausted by it.
But that question—Have you really never faced a challenge?—often opens something deeper. Because once the institutional script is set aside, a different kind of reflection becomes possible. What about the pressure to be exceptional? The fear of disappointing people who have invested everything in your success? The quiet loneliness of having a life so optimized that you never learned how to want anything for yourself? These are challenges, too. But they rarely appear in personal statements—not because they’re trivial, but because they don’t fit the genre. They don’t resolve. They don’t inspire. They just sit there: unresolved and real.
As if all of this weren’t complicated enough, some fellowships and scholarships explicitly ask students to describe a challenge they’ve overcome. The prompt itself assumes not only that challenge is a universal experience, but that it can be narrated in a clean arc: conflict, resilience, growth. The result is a genre that pushes all students—regardless of background—toward emotional simplification. Even those who might otherwise resist the performance reflex often feel cornered into telling a particular kind of story—not because it’s true, but because it’s expected.
It’s no wonder so many students sit in front of a blank screen, caught between what they want to say and what they think they’re supposed to. And it’s no wonder so much writing feels flat, when what’s being asked isn’t honesty—it’s translation.
Students are absolutely capable of honest, thoughtful writing—when they’re given the space and the trust to try. But those chances are rare.
Some worry their stories are too much; others worry they’re not enough. They don’t want to seem like they’re mining their inner lives for rubric points, or competing for sympathy. But much like intelligence, suffering is relative. What might seem insignificant in one context can still be formative in another. Writing about challenge isn’t about proving you’ve endured the most—it’s about practicing reflection, recognizing what shaped you, and moving toward what most educators genuinely hope to see: confident self-awareness.
If Part II has been about the traps—the constraints, expectations, and compromises that shape student writing—then Part III is about what happens when we try to write beyond them. What becomes possible when we stop performing—not to impress, but to understand? What if writing weren’t a performance of excellence, but a practice of inquiry—a way of making sense of experience, of shaping thought, of becoming real to ourselves?
This next section explores what that kind of writing looks like: uncertain, unresolved, sometimes messy—but also honest, alive, and capable of meaning-making in ways performance never is.