Compulsory schooling and the invention of abnormal childhood In order to understand the recent development of the institutional ensemble dealing with "unadapted" childhood, one must go back to the origins of this movement : institutions and institutional practices, social characteristics of the producers of this new "science" and of the clientele of this new "market", ideological environment of this scientific discourse. By extricating the ties between medico-pedagogical theories and practices and the society of an epoch, one can escape from the illusion of the medico-pedagogical field's absolute autonomy and the circle which furnishes its scientific caution to agents when they justify their actions by using inadaptation statistics ; these statistics are themselves constructed according to classifications which reflect social pigeonholes.