This exploration of contemporary beliefs about truancy looks historically at the relationship between views about the normality, as well as the deviance, of particular patterns of schooling, and argues that truanting needs to be understood, in social terms, as being out of place. The argument is developed through a discussion of state policies on the regulation of schooling in 19th century Scotland. Among the themes developed in the book are the following: (1) state regulation of schooling was instituted in the 19th century, as a program for class control, by an elite grouping with a shared understanding of the fundamental issues about the organization of social relations at that particular time; (2) schools were structured as mechanisms of discipline for the children of working class people; and (3) truancy in contemporary Britain is usually dealt with as a type of individual deviance, yet it has been produced socially. The appendix contains an extract from instructions to inspectors in August 1840. An index is provided. (256 references) (MLF)