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

Abstract

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. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams pointed out, deeply problematic. This paper interrogates the idea of community and looks at the way it has been used historically in rural education as well as some of the ways that it is understood and used in educational, social science, policy, and governance discourses today. In this analysis I draw on the foundational communitarian analysis of American social thinkers Paul Theobald and Robert Putnam as well as on Williams's critical analysis of rurality and community. I argue that effective rural educational policy today needs to problematize the idea of community and develop it in ways that avoids 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 rural spaces.

Notes

Williams writes: “In many thousands of cases, there is more community in the modern village, as a result of this process of new legal and democratic rights than at any point in the recorded or imagined past” (1973, p. 131). “I learned in a family that had lived through this experience, that there is more real community in the modern village than at any period in the remembered past. The changes that came, through democratic development and through economic struggle, sweetened and purified an older order. Yet, to hold to this reality is to recognize an extending connection, for it is not, in the strict sense, a rural vision at all” (1973, p. 237).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Corbett

Michael Corbett is professor in the School of Education at Acadia University. His research interrogates contemporary and historical conceptions of the rural, and particularly the ways in which these conceptions have inflected discourses around education, schooling, and literacies. This work has included studies of rural outmigration in Atlantic Canada, literacies in rural contexts, and studies of small schools.