This research was undertaken to understand how general education teachers who work in inclusive classrooms conceptualise inclusive education and understand their individual commitments to this practice. This study intended to make explicit the social meaning that resides in and is constituted by teachers doing their everyday work in schools (Erickson, F. 1977. "Some Approaches to Inquiry in School-Community Ethnography." "Anthropology and Education Quarterly" 8 (2): 58-69), and in doing so add depth to the body of work in the field of inclusive education that has largely approached research by trying to understand its technical implementation. Analysis of ethnographic data collected at an urban elementary school that had been inclusive for over a decade before adding a segregated classroom for some students with disabilities to the site, demonstrated that the meanings attached to inclusive education were quite variable and elastic for most of the teachers in the study. Further, a culture of silence was evident in all data sources throughout the period of data collection, which worked to reinforce the school's public status as "inclusive", and thus legitimised the systematic exclusion of the students in the segregated classroom, as well as encouraged ways of thinking about some students that would lead their eventual marginalisation and stigmatisation. This study concludes that inclusive education needs to be discussed and taught as an ideological commitment.