This book outlines the proceedings of a one-day conference on anthropological perspectives on dropouts. This is a phenomenon which plagues US schools and the papers in this book discuss a problem that is symptomatic of the deep malaise of our time about the articulation of school and society. This was the first of a series of Stanford Centennial Conferences on children-at-risk and it should be of interest to anthropologists, teachers, educationalists, researchers, educational psychologists and sociologists.