The categorizing and labeling of school-age children as “normal” or not has continued in Europe since the early mass schooling practices of the 19th century. Since that time (and even before), different countries have come to start diagnosing (and therefore labeling and thus creating) children with specific learning difficulties that fell outside standard expectations. It is especially since the beginning of the 20th century, and especially since the mid-20th century, that many different mental or physical learning or behavioral disabilities were emerging and evolving in Europe and the U.S. to describe school-age children and how they and their education should be handled in the classroom (e.g., Feinstein, 2010, Lange et al., 2010, Kalverboer, 1978, Clements & Peters, 1962). By the late 1990s, “neuro-” terms started to come into use to refer to the multiple neurological “disorders” that have not been considered “neurotypical” (e.g., autism, dyslexia, ADHD). In the more than two decades since then, public and private discourse has started turning to the umbrella terms of “neurodiversity” to describe how there are many different ways of “thinking, learning, and behaving” in the world (Baumer & Frueh, 2021), and those who are diagnosed as a “neurological minority” are “neurodiverse” (ND). In consideration of the historical development of defining, diagnosing, and labeling children as being learning disabled, this paper will focus on the Austrian educational discourse that has surrounded children who would be labeled as neurodiverse. The aim is to see if and how the more “socially accepted” new ND labels entered Austrian educational discourse. The relationship between the official Austrian educational discourse and the unofficial reality surrounding ND will be discusses according to an analysis of a variety of official and unofficial educational sources published since the 1990s (e.g., schooling laws, school board publications, world congress reports, teacher interviews, etc.). By looking into the different discourses, we should then see what roles and effects educational actors, such as the Austrian ministries on the one hand and teachers on the other, have in making people “abnormal” or in trying to re-make them as “normal.”

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