ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on children who don’t behave at school. It makes the point that the metaphors and constructs which are used to generate understanding about such difficult behaviour are often misleading, evoking as they do all kinds of quasi-scientific explanation. For the mélange of disparate metaphor and theory around which understanding of people’s behaviour is popularly constructed – in both lay and professional circles – rests in the reification of what is little more than tentative psychological conjecture.
