This article explores how the sorting and separating of pupils into entangled categories of social/cultural disadvantage and disability in the 1960s through the 1980s created populations of concern. Even though the United States and Germany are typically contrasted in their approaches to inclusive education, a new scientisation of the "social" had similar effects in both countries. While inclusion is usually presumed as the opposite of segregation, we examine how distinct curricula -- often administered in separate classrooms or schools -- became deemed essential to prepare target populations for eventual inclusion. In the United States, demands for desegregation and mainstreaming were met in part with the design of curricula and instructional strategies for populations marked by categories of disability and/or cultural disadvantage. In West Germany, similar pedagogies appeared in materials designed for special and lower-track schools aimed at pupils classified as learning disabled and/or socio-culturally disadvantaged. Drawing on archival analysis of research journals, reports, and curricular materials from both countries, we examine how science pedagogies constituted social/cultural disadvantage and/or disability as a type of learner with limited experiences requiring compensation and emotional needs requiring affective calibration. Similar practices produced these populations of concern, enclosing them in a pre-scholastic intervention space and prescribing targeted strategies as necessary for their integration as healthy, responsible citizens. At stake is understanding how curricular differentiation directed to previously excluded groups can generate new subdivisions of the social -- authorising separate (and unequally positioned) instruction in the name of inclusion.