ABSTRACT
The history of special education has been a con-test over the representation of students who are difficult to teach. A moral discourse in which students' educational difficulties are seen as sinful behavior has competed with a social discourse in which school difficulties are attributed to environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, or familial factors and a psychomedical discourse in which school difficulties are attributed to genetic or organic causes. After years of debate, the moral discourse has faded to the periphery, and the psycho medical has dominated, beating back a variety of social explanations for students' school difficulties.
