In Sweden and elsewhere, students permanently excluded from school are removed from their local environment, and sometimes their parental home, and moved to a rural residential care home. Thus "home" and "school" are clearly considered places where problems exist, but it is the young people themselves who are scrutinised and…

This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as "difficult, disordered and disturbed". The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educational…