Until this book was published, most writing on special education was about specific disabilities and how to cope with them. This book, however, considers the broader context, looking at many problems for the wider system that have arisen through integration of special education within it. The book is international and comparative in its focus and includes much North American material and work by North American researchers.

Acknowledgements. Glossary. Foreword. Introduction. Part 1: Ideologies, Issues and Practices. 1. The Mentally Retarded: Ideologies of Care and Surplus Population. 2. Comparative Special Education: Ideology, Differentiation and Allocation in England and the United States. 3. The Politics of Integration in England. 4. The Differential Diagnosis of Special Education: Managing Social Pathology as Individual Disability. 5. The Role of the Educational Psychologist in the Post-Warnock Era. Part 2: The Nature and Uses of Qualitative Approaches. 6. The Labelling of Educable Mentally-retarded Children. 7. Case Studies of Mainstreaming: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Special Schooling. 8. Adolescence and Physical Imparement: An Interactionist View. 9. Socially Produced Identities, Intimacy and the Problem of Competence among the Retarded. Notes on Contributors. Indices.