What do schools do with children who are difficult to teach or who are troublesome to manage?  Such students, no doubt, have always been present in our schools. Yet the way we talk about students, and hence the way we act toward them, has changed significantly from the beginnings of the US to the present time.

    The history of special education has been a contest over the representation of students who are difficult to teach.  A moral discourse in which students’ educational difficulties were seen as sinful behavior dominated early Colonial times in the US.  When waves of immigrants—especially those from Eastern European and Catholic countries, shifts in populations from the country side to the city, and urbanization transformed the US into an industrial nation, students’ educational difficulties were accounted for in a new way. Faulty socialization and bad mothering on the part of new immigrants was blamed for students’ difficulties in school. In the 20^th Century, the development of psychometric measures coupled with a demand for greater educational efficiency, generated a psycho-medical discourse in which the source of school difficulty was placed within children’s brains—rather than their soul or heart. Despite this shift, the source of school difficulty remained beneath students’ skin and between their ears.

    A social discourse, in which school difficulties are attributed to environmental, cultural, socio-economic or familial factors has competed with the psycho-medical discourse in which school difficulties are attributed to genetic or organic causes. After years of contestation, the psycho-medical discourse has dominated, beating back a variety of social explanation for students’ school difficulties—for reasons I will explore in the paper.

     What do schools do with children who are difficult to teach or who are troublesome to manage?  Such students, no doubt, have always been present in our schools. Yet the way we talk about students, and hence the way we act toward them, has changed significantly from the beginnings of the US to the present time.

   The history of special education has been a contest over the representation of students who are difficult to teach.  A moral discourse in which students’ educational difficulties were seen as sinful behavior dominated early Colonial times in the US. The child-rearing literature of the Puritans assumed a basically sinful child for whom severe adult discipline and Christian guidance were the optimal interventions.

   When waves of immigrants—especially those from Eastern European and Catholic countries, shifts in populations from the country side to the city, and urbanization transformed the US into an industrial nation, students’ educational difficulties were accounted for in a new way. Faulty socialization and bad mothering on the part of new immigrants was blamed for students’ difficulties in school.

   In the 20^th Century, the development of psychometric measures coupled with a demand for greater educational efficiency, generated a psycho-medical discourse in which the source of school difficulty was placed within children’s brains—rather than their soul or heart. Alfred Binet developed a test that purported to measure “natural born” intelligence and yielded a mental age to identify “defective” children for the French government.  Binet did more than develop an intelligence test. By introducing a statistical test of normality, he introduced an entirely new way of seeing behavior and classifying students. Unlike a medical discourse that defines disabilities in terms of health or sickness, the statistical model defines abnormality in terms of a person’s position on an assumed normal distribution relative to others tested within a population.  A statistical definition of “normal” always produces “abnormals.” While a world in which a population of people did not show any symptoms of a particular medical disability is possible, in the statistical world, a specified percentage of the population will always be disabled.  To say that “2/3% of a population is mentally retarded because 2/3% of the population scores more than 2/3 standard deviations below the mean” is a tautology.  There will always be 2.3% of any population more than 2.3 S.D below the mean on any measure, because by definition, the normal distribution curve places 2.3% of the population more than 2 S.D below the mean.

   The amalgamation of the statistical sense of abnormality with the medical sense of organic cuses led to increasingly wider definitions of disabilities. Imported by L. M. Termin and John Goddard to the US, IQ test scores were transformed into a pathological sign carrying all the implications of a medical disability, even though there was not necessarily any evidence that test performance was a direct result of the biological condition of the test taker.

   Special education categories change. Old categories of disability disappear and new ones emerge to replace them—a process that uncovers the socially constructed nature of special education categories. The “mentally retarded category has been replaced by the “learning disability” and “educationally handicapped” construct. A new category, “Attention Deficit Disorder” has emerged that covers students who are “impulsive, distractible” and “hyperactive.” Although advocates of ADD say it is a neurological syndrome, the exact mechanism underlying ADD is unknown.  Because the brain can not be examined directly, ADD is inferred from children’s fidgety or inattentive behavior in school or at home.  Because virtually all children exhibit these behaviors at some time, the entire school population is potentially eligible for this new learning disability.

   A social discourse, in which school difficulties are attributed to environmental, cultural, socio-economic or familial factors has competed with the psycho-medical discourse in which school difficulties are attributed to genetic or organic causes. After years of contestation, the psycho-medical discourse has dominated, beating back a variety of social explanation for students’ school difficulties—for reasons I will explore in the paper.