ABSTRACT
Many of those on the voyage of the ship of Australian education throughout its relatively short period of European settlement since the late eighteenth century have fallen or been cast overboard. It is the ranting of an old and disgruntled academic worn down by the weight of the enduring empirical evidence of inequality and educational exclusion. In this chapter, the author proposes to test the bold assertions with particular reference to the fabrication or collective fiction of Special Educational Needs and its role in the manufacture of inability in schooling. He focuses on three areas: a world of difference and inequality; a world of needs; and a world of divided populations. Following the work of Mary Douglas and Zygmunt Bauman, the author considers the production of human waste or surplus populations by and in an education system claiming to be inclusive and the scramble to deal with that inexorable contradiction.
