Abstract
Editor's note.
In the 1970s Professor Nicholas Hobbs directed a comprehensive study on child classification while Provost at Vanderbilt University in the USA. Though neglected in recent years his 1975 edited text, ‘Issues in the Classification of Children’, remains a relevant and important source of thinking about categorisation. Given the current policy interest in categories of special educational need it seems appropriate to reconsider some of these ideas. The following article originally appeared as Chapter 4 from Volume One of the Hobbs text. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Hobbs family.
The American spellings and style in this article have been altered for consistency with house style, as has the format of the references list.