This paper explores the tension between prevailing ideologies of the high school dropout as “loser” and data which indicate that many dropouts are highly motivated, intelligent, and critical of educational institutions and labor market opportunities. Attention is paid to who drops out, with a particular focus on gender, race/ethnicity, and class, and to how these dropouts are portrayed in social-science, popular, and teacher-training literature. It is concluded that explanations offered for the “tragedy of the dropouts” which isolate individual or family factors function to delegitimate dropouts' critique of schools and the labor market, bolster the image of education as the great equalizer, and deflect attention away from race, class, and gender biases which operate in schools and at work.

THROUGHOUT the world today men and women with traumatic paraplegia and quadriplegia are making increased demands on the health care system to do more than simply manage them through their immediate post injury period. They require workable solutions to the totality of psycho-social problems inherent in a continued state of disability. Yet, Professor Timothy J. Nugent, past President of the National Paraplegia Foundation (I97I), pointed out that many of the as sumptions of the past and some of the advice given in clinics today actually result in more psychological, emotional and social trauma than the physical situation justifies. He believes that the social-psychologic trauma is not simply experienced by the individual, but that it has been imposed on him and can become fixed after many years.In the past, traditional medical and surgical care for paraplegia has tended to focus on treating the patient for such common medical complications of spinal cord injury as joint contractures and decubitus ulcers. Rehabilitation therapy has concentrated on fostering independence in self care. Vocational rehabilitation has trained the patient for returning to his job or has provided him with a new, marketable skill. Within the larger framework of acute, restorative and rehabili tative treatment of the spinal cord injured lies the relatively ignored area of diagnosis and treatment of sexual function after spinal cord injury.Those with spinal cord injury protest that like able-bodied people, they also are entitled to a satisfactory sex life, a respectable self image and the expectation of being treated like other people who have a need for emotional, sexual expression. They are becoming less content to lead lives affected by the myths commonly believed by many medical personnel and others in society. Some of these myths suggest that handicapped people have no sexual needs or desires; others imply that people with physical disability have excessive or perverted sexual needs. Unfortunately, when patients are treated by health care professionals who hold these beliefs, the tenor of treatment may be such that it predisposes the patient to act and live according to the beliefs of the treater. In some cases, the physician's personal anxieties regarding sexuality make him virtually inaccessible to the patient who wishes to seek advice on this subject. The subtly rebuffed patient cannot distinguish between the physician's discomfort and the appropriateness of his sexually oriented questions or needs. Often the result is that open discussion is made impossible.

In differentiating modalities of group technique, this article presents an explicit definition of and systematic criteria for characterizing the support group A theoretical base for the support group is proposed, and comparisons are made among this group, the self-help group, and group p s ychotherapy.

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