Common sense allows that persons unable to handle a difficult problem can be labeled “disabled.” Social analysis shows that being labeled often invites a public response that multiplies the difficulties facing the seemingly unable. Cultural analysis shows that disability refers most precisely to inadequate performances only on tasks that are arbitrarily circumscribed from daily life. Disabilities are less the property of persons than they are moments in a cultural focus. Everyone in any culture is subject to being labeled and disabled.

Culturally and educationally, the United States specializes in the production of kinds of persons described first by ethnic, racial, and linguistic lines and second by supposed mental abilities. Overlaps between the two systems of classification are frequent, systematically haphazard, and often deleterious. An examination of classrooms around the country shows shifting currents of concern and tension that invite the attribution of labels for mental and/or minority-group status. This article introduces a language for a cultural analysis—a language of people interpreting the interpretations of others—and pursues an example from a classroom where both the good sense and the dangers of categories for learning-disabled and minority-group status are on display.

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This article argues that the anthropology of education must focus on what people do to educate themselves outside the constraints constituting the problematics of schooling. Anthropologists must do this precisely to fulfill their public role as legitimate participants in the conversations about understanding and transforming schooling. When anthropologists work at losing control in their research practice, they discover the breadth of the educative efforts that are triggered by the arbitrariness of cultural forms and, most interestingly, produce new forms. If this is the case, then the anthropology of education is the anthropology of cultural transformation that it has been difficult for the discipline to produce. [cross‐cultural research, culture change]

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