This article examines the complex ways in which teacher constructions of their experiences of teaching in a rural, disadvantaged context shape their taken-for-granted understandings of barriers to basic education. This article attempts to deconstruct these value-laden understandings of barriers to education. We draw on Foucault's notion of discourse analysis in conceptualising how teachers make sense of reality in a context where HIV & AIDS prevalence is high, and where HIV & AIDS intersects with other mitigating barriers to basic education. It is argued that the processes by which we "know" and make sense of how to behave in our worlds are generated and sustained through historically and culturally specific social processes, including the process of education. The findings in the study suggest that the teachers relied on a deficiency framework as a basis for understanding the intersecting barriers to basic education. Five key themes relating to this framework emerged: othering, difference as deficit, homogenising of the subject, silence, and the positionality of the teacher in relation to values--the ethics of not acting. The article explores contradictions and contestations embedded in these dominant discourses.