What learning disability does: Sustaining the ideology of schooling

This article uses discourse theory to determine what kind of relationship learning disabilities have with taken-for-granted assumptions of schooling and the social and political contexts in which schools are situated. The authors argue that learning disabilities, by helping to explain several contradictions and anomalies of schooling, function to sustain dominant assumptions underlying schooling and society. From this perspective, the field of learning disabilities plays a role in maintaining a status quo in which the inequitable distribution of social goods in society is seen as the "natural " consequence of an "equitable " meritocracy. The authors call on learning disabilities practitioners to augment the support they offer students with efforts to actively confront the inequities of schooling and society. Individuals must be equipped to reflect upon the knowledge structures we pro-vide, to identify themselves with respect to them, to penetrate their mystiques. They must be equipped as well to reflect upon the erosion of community. (Greene