ABSTRACT
Certain kids will always be "school dumb" as long as what it means to be "school smart" to learn, to know, to understand is not challenged at its ontological roots. The common schoolers and the movement toward greater uniformity in pedagogic methods assumed a correct form of language and knowledge acquisition. At the core of the state schooling apparatus was the feature of military discipline, a type used in mass urban institutions of every kind. Schooling and learning appear to be on a collision course. Neither remediation, special education, the insertion of psychology into education, nor the critiques made by sociologists of education have halted the failure of learning-centered, knowledge-oriented schooling. In the opinion of some psychologists and educators, special education and the syndromes that increasingly come to comprise it is one of scientific psychology's most lucrative contemporary myths that has tragic consequences for hundreds of thousands of children and their families.
