The Ambivalence Of Community: A Critical Analysis Of Rural Education's Oldest Trope

The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations.  At the same time, community has been, and continues to be, a deeply problematic concept.  This paper will interrogate the idea of community and look at the way it has been used historically in rural education.  In fact, rurality and community are sometimes conflated as the rural imagery and place attachment is often held up as an example of the kind of solidarity that once existed before the advent of modernity and ubiquitous strangerhood described in the writings of many contemporary social theorists.  Community is, in rural education discourse, a well-worn trope that connects pedagogical, curricular and political arguments to Deweyan pragmatism and the idea that a proper education begins with experience. What has followed is generations of rural education in defense of community, in resistance to urban-generated standardization, and support for local forms of educational practice which connect to and hopefully enrich local lifeways.

I argue that this rather simplistic place-based thinking tends to lend only partial support to cultural, social and economic development in rural areas for many reasons, but particularly because it is typically somewhat ignorant of wider global connections and contemporary theorizations of rural social space. I will argue that effective rural educational leadership needs to problematize the idea of community and develop it in ways that avoid playing into nostalgic and retrogressive notions of the rural.  This argument is based on a conception of place that keeps in focus multiple and complex understandings of emerging postproductivist globalized rural spaces.