This article tries to analyze and reflect on the educational and social situations of those so-called 'problematic', 'marginal' or 'maladjusted' high school drop-outs. It unfolds its analysis in two folds: it points out the 'politics of difference' within the education profession through its discourses about and ways of defining drop-outs on the one hand, while it shows the life of a junior high-school student who ran away from school and studied in a social welfare institute on the other. The author appropriates the concept of 'politics of difference' for his analysis of both the self-construction of the education profession and the individual, so as to explicate two facts: first, our society produces marginal social spaces, and this center-margin distinction forms the basis of the profession. Second, in order to survive persons in marginal situations have needs and strategies of self-identity formation which are different from persons in the main-stream, and the principle of politics of difference is also functional on this level. Through this two-fold analysis, the author tries to reflect on and critique the 'politics of difference' phenomenon of education in constructing and maintaining professional status.