A View from the Past

As we reviewed articles from past issues of the NREA professional journals, we were struck by the dichotomy of how rural schools are faced with some of the same issues today as they were years ago: isolation, finding and keeping good leaders, training teachers, and changing curricula demands. We were also reminded of the impact of developing technology on the rural cultures: availability of broader curricula, the problem of the affordability of such innovations, and training of faculty and staff to use the technology for instruction. "The recent awakening in the study of rural life has given to the rural school a new task and a new responsibility . . . To the end that the school may meet more adequately the demands of the new "ruralism", better trained teachers are needed-teachers who have a clear conception of the mission of the new rural school and an enthusiasm born of a knowledge of what ought to be done and how it may be accomplished." This quote, taken from the first volume in a series of teacher education texts published in 1917 entitled Rural School Management (p. ix), illustrates the persistence of the problems faced by schools that are more commonly defined by their demographics or distances from cities. "The U.S. Census Bureau defined rural as 'a residential category of places outside urbanized areas in open country, or in communities with less than 2,500 inhabitants, or where the populations density is less that 1,000 inhabitants per square mile'" (cited in Stern, 1994; cited in Horn, 1995; cited in Oliver, 2007). In other words, rural has typically been defined by their "distance from a city, population density, apparent isolation, availability of resources, homogeneity of population, and similar characteristics" (Oliver, 2007). While the "new ruralism" of 1917 was centered on the then new practice of providing educational services outside of city limits, we can say that the "new ruralism" of today struggles with the very definition of rural, even though finding and keeping effective leaders, finding and training highly qualified teachers, providing state-of-the-art technology, and meeting state and federal curricula mandates still take precedence. An adjunct to the definition of rural may be understanding how the "rural myth" may have changed in recent years. The commonly held myth includes references to rural life as "safe, peaceful, and good" (Oliver 2007) or that rural schools have "less specialization among teachers, less equipment both in and out of classroom, and less bureaucracy...greater tendency toward teaching the aspects of basic education, more recognition of the individual contributions, and more relaxed relationships between faculty, administration and staff' (Sher, 1983 cited in Oliver 2007). Our current "new ruralism" takes issue with the myth that rural communities are mostly agrarian in nature, although some still are, and that these communities exist outside the mainstream of American urban culture. The myth included the thought that every person, in one way or another, can boast of a direct experience with life on the farm. …