ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals how school textbooks in England act as 'majoritarian' to categorise, contain, and constrain societal conceptions of the Other, and in so doing empty out and invalidate the lives of disabled people. It examines textbooks as they are operationalised in supposedly democratic systems – where 'covert forms of manipulation', pronominal games, and illocutionary mirrors reflect an imposed lexis. Crawford relates that textbooks are social constructions, employing a selective tradition to inculcate pupils into the cultural and socio-economic order of society and relationships of power and dominance. The mediating role of the textbook, according to the author's research, was – by the avoidance of an interaction with disabled people – one of the promotion of a social construction of disability based upon inexact scholarship, omission, and imbalanced information. Rethinking the ontological categories enunciated in textbooks in toto it might be observed that their importance centres upon the recognition that they can and do reproduce inequalities in societ.
