Dynamics of Social Class, Race, and Place in Rural Education

Howley, C. B., Howley, A., & Johnson, J. D. (Eds.) (2014). Dynamics of social class, race, and place in rural education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.Dynamics is book about social justice in world where traditional, modern, and global exist simultaneously and side by side by side. The authors represent that world from rural points of view in which intersectionality of social class, race, and place is inescapable, active, and complex. The editors frame arguments identify institutional and cultural barriers that thwart rural citizens' possibilities to organize their lives as they wish, choose their own ends, and realize them as they think best (Mouffe, 1996, p. 20). At center of that frame is schooling or the State's schools, as editors put it, in neoliberal times. From variety of angles and with different levels of conviction, all contributors question compatibility of neoliberal values and social justice in rural places.In preface, introduction, and closing chapter, editors work as opticians help readers use three lenses- class, race, and place-to focus sharply on roles of schooling in rural life. Neoliberalism, they argue, positions rurality in marginal roles at best-a possible supply of cheap natural and, perhaps, human resources-and as wasted spaces and lives at worst. Neoliberal schooling mediates against rural traditions, inveigling rural students adopt modern and global dispositions through a global curriculum they will need if they are take personal responsibility, if they are going get out into global workforce and succeed (Barber, 2012). According editors, each lens adds readers' overall acuity when considering economic, cultural, and political dimensions of past, present, and future. Moreover, combination of lenses is necessary when readers imagine how able break with what is fixed, finished, objectively and independently real (Greene, 1995, p. 19).To my reading, authors tell four compelling stories: place confounds social class relationships; social forces direct public schools against rural place and class; direction is systemic and systematic; and therefore, most school outcomes are negative in terms of place sustainability. Using metaphor from Marx's notion of commodification, Michael Corbett interrogates official efforts reduce schools common denominator in order compare them dispassionately. Visiting three schools in urban, suburban, and rural Canada, he demonstrates how social class works differently, rendering comparisons questionable both in intent and consequence. Rakhat Zholdoshalieva, Alan DeYoung, and Umut Zholdoshalieva describe invention of an indigent social class within collision of traditional, modern, and global in rural Kyrgyzstan. The Soviets built communities among nomad clans, used schooling modernize and increase these populations, and then abandoned region when their command economy disintegrated. [N]ow formerly sophisticated villages like Ylay Talla are in serious decline, and knowledge and values that used be transmitted in their schools have very little instrumental utility or moral imperative (p. 63). In United States, Robert Pittman, Dixie McGinty, and Julie Johnson-Busbin offer empirical warrants for their counterintuitive conclusion that high school dropout rates are lower in more remote areas because local values of independence and self-reliance are expressed through family expectations.Paul Theobald and Craig Campbell argue that rural communities (and therefore schools) have suffered continuously from America's initial rejection of old world feudalism its current embrace of global capitalism. In search of profits, all things, experiences, and beings become monetized, leading disenchantment of rural places and people. Jerry Johnson demonstrates continued legacy of American feudalism in detailed study of class- and racebased school funding formulas and policies in Mississippi. …

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