Description
Book SynopsisPublished with a new preface, this innovative case study from Nova Scotia analyzes the relationship between rural communities and contemporary education. Rather than supporting place-sensitive curricula and establishing networks within community populations, the rural school has too often stood apart from local life, with the generally unintended consequence that many educationally successful rural youth come to see their communities and lifestyles as places to be left behind. They face what Michael Corbett calls a mobility imperative, which, he shows, has been central to contemporary schooling.
Learning to Leave argues that if education is to be democratic and serve the purpose of economic, social, and cultural development, then it must adapt and respond to the specificity of its locale, the knowledge practices of the people, and the needs of those who struggle to remain in challenged rural places.
Trade Review“A major research contribution—one that will join a relatively short list of first-rate books aimed at helping the education research community, as well as the general public, understand the convoluted phenomenon known as rural education.”
Journal of Research in Rural Education “An engrossing, theoretically sophisticated, and important piece of community sociology.”
Rural SociologyTable of Contents
- Preface to the 2020 Edition
- Foreword
- Acknowledgment
- Chapter 1
- Introduction
- Migration and Regional Dependency: The Brain Drain
- The Migration Imperative in Rural Education
- Challenges to the Migration Imperative in Rural Schooling
- Why Would Young People Stay?
- Schooling and Migration in Atlantic Canada
- Notes
- Chapter 2
- Reconceptualizing Resistance
- Habitus, Discourse and Place
- Resistance Theory in the Sociology of Education
- Bourdieu's Logic of Practice
- Poststructural Resistance Theory
- Resistance and Community
- Rural Identity Politics
- The Organized Rural Community as a Resistant Site
- Conclusion: To Choose and to Move
- Notes
- Chapter 3
- Who Stays, Who Goes and Where
- Education and Migration on Digby Neck, 1963-1998
- The Economy
- Education Levels
- Mobility
- The Education/Mobility Connection
- Summary
- Notes
- Chapter 4
- Parallel Education Systems
- The Classes of 1963-1974
- Family and Work: An Education for Staying
- The Hand on the Shoulder: Socialization for Leaving
- Formal Education: Streaming for Leaving
- in the 1960s and early 1970s
- Learning to Do: The Construction of Intelligence
- and Identity in a Coastal Community
- They Wanted Me to Go to School: Schooling, Identity and Family
- Leaving Home: Education and Occupational Pioneering
- I Didn't Want to End Up
- Resisting Displacement
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Chapter 5
- The Boom Years
- The Classes of 1975-1986
- Gender, Work and Schooling
- Defining Security: Education, Identity and Work
- Family/Class
- The Mobile Family
- Becoming a Stranger
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Chapter 6
- Surviving the Crisis
- The Classes of 1987-1998
- What Is There For the Young Ones?
- Quitting in the 1990s: Finding Something to
- Do When There's Nothing to Do
- The New Reserve Army of Labour
- Getting Out: Class, Gender and Education
- Survival and Family
- Back to the Future: Surviving in the New Economy
- Resistance
- Conclusion: The Mobile Discourse of Schooling
- Notes
- Chapter 7
- Conclusion
- Place Matters
- Migration, Education and Ambivalence: Mobility Capital
- Ambiguity, Mobility and Resistance
- Resistances
- Rural Schooling and Community
- Notes
- References
- Index
