Beyond Curriculum Compliance: Informal Religious Governance and the Cultural Production of Student Morality in a Vocational Boarding School

Purpose: This study examines how religious values are institutionalized and sustained through informal governance mechanisms within a vocational boarding school setting. Rather than treating religious education as a curricular outcome, the study seeks to understand how everyday practices, cultural routines, and non-formal authority structures collectively shape student morality. By situating religious value formation within the intersection of culture and institutional administration, the study addresses a gap in international literature that often overlooks informal governance as a constitutive dimension of educational regulation. Method: The research adopts a qualitative descriptive design grounded in field-based inquiry. Data were collected through prolonged observation, in-depth interviews with school leaders, religious teachers, and students, as well as institutional document analysis. Analytical procedures followed iterative stages of data condensation, thematic display, and interpretive verification, supported by triangulation across data sources. The analysis focused on identifying patterns of informal regulation, cultural legitimation, and pedagogical authority operating beyond formal policy instruments. Findings: The findings reveal that religious value formation is governed less by formal curriculum mandates than by embedded cultural practices adapted from pesantren traditions. Daily rituals, habituation strategies, moral exemplification, and corrective sanctions function as informal regulatory instruments that normalize religious discipline and ethical conduct. These practices operate through moral authority and communal expectations rather than coercive enforcement. However, the study also identifies structural constraints, particularly the influence of global youth culture and limitations in institutional infrastructure, which complicate the sustainability of these governance arrangements. Significance: This study contributes to socio-legal and educational governance scholarship by conceptualizing religious education as a form of informal cultural governance. It extends discussions within law, culture, and administration by demonstrating how moral regulation in educational institutions is produced through negotiated practices rather than formal legal compliance alone, offering a transferable analytical framework for comparable contexts globally