A Logic Quite Different
Two comments from anonymous reviewers offered suggestions that I will address under this rubric ("a logic quite different"). One of the comments advised me to anchor "the rural" in definitions or examples. Another comment found the essay very agreeable, but sloppy and even illogical. I interpret the two comments as related to one another and I will address them in this short interlineation. By the way, people who write welcome, or should welcome, critique, and I do (or realize that I always should!). I love nests, parenthetical remarks, and recursive loops, so I welcome Editor Glass's additional suggestion that I provide a variety of hypertext links to contextualize an essay about context. This file is one site of these links; the other sites are the reference list and the two lists of suggested readings, which appear at the end of the essay itself. Connections to Rural
First, I consider connections to rural. This article was originally given as a paper in a symposium organized by Ted Coladarci, editor of the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Ted asked a number of colleagues to address a simple question, "What is rural about rural educational research?" He served as chair as chair of the symposium, and Maureen Porter was the discussant. In addition to Ted, Maureen, and me, others participating in the symposium were Paul Theobald, Betty Beach, and Dal Hedlund. Betty, Dal, and I delivered formal papers ("Using Human Ecological Approaches to Study Rural Childhood" and "Rural? In Educational Research: It's a Matter of Purpose," respectively. Paul's contribution was a more formative set of remarks about teacher education. But his new book ( Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and Renewal of Community, published by Westview) deals extensively with both the philosophy and the examples cited by the reviewer as so necessary. (Note that the word "rural" does not appear in the title of Paul's book. By examing the genealogy of book titles, someone in communications or rhetoric might profit us all by telling of the deformations that commercial publishers impose on the works they take to market. I am also a publisher, by the way, and am definitely complicit though sanctioned to use the word.) Let me explain the practical urgency of the question symposium participants examined. JRRE editors and reviewers confront manuscripts that appear quite uninterested (often in the guise of disinterest) in the rural circumstance. Many contributors appear to believe that research conducted with rural subjects is properly rural, for example, research on "total quality management" conducted in a rural school system. Why this is not the case is the subject of this article. I need to add that several "essentialist" definitions of rural are available for use by researchers. My favorite scheme for large-scale study, especially for statistical analysis, of rural schools (all US schools and school districts are tagged by type of locale in this scheme) are the NCES "Johnson Codes." The details are in Frank Johnson's 1989 AERA paper. The codes are employed in the Common Core of Data, that compendium of information with information on every school, LEA, and SEA in the nation. For a review of other applicable schemes see NCES's The Condition of Education in Rural Schools, edited by Joyce Stern. NCES is a wonderful source of data, by the way, a situation that one can appreciate only if (a) one like numbers and (b) one realizes that it is a unique institution on the planet. If you wish to examine rural issues with NCES data, but have never done so, check out Gary Huang's Digest about these data, as well as his much longer Rural Education Data User's Guide. Logic Et Cetera
Now, to the second observation, the perception of this manuscript's sloppiness and illogic. The essay attempts to help scholars who are, who profess to be, or who would like to be concerned with rural education. It seeks to show them what they have not seen, and to explain why they are unable to see. In their case, the unseen may not be so thickly veiled as to remain obscure. Other readers, those who regard "the rural" as passe or tangential, may indeed find the presentation more or less foreign, confusing, and vague. In this essay, neither are those facts repeated, nor those arguments from other contexts recounted, which might support the interpretation given. Instead, readers are confronted with an abundance of assumptions, speculations, interpretations, and projections. And, at the same time, the piece advises those who would assemble and interpret the facts and arguments how to proceed. The complication of the issue is worse still: the essay makes the claim that education of a different order is needed if rural connections and purposes are to be honored. In short, the story told in this manuscript is messy and cannot be made too neat, except in ways that risked distorting the telling. I see that have to tell a longer story, but briefly. I'm troubled that educationists take too seriously the methods they deploy to study issues. They fetishize method, as critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch observe them to. This fetish is new to academe, believe it or not. Under the modernist regimen, technique prevails over substance. Auden realized this shortcoming of the social sciences, and educationists ought to recall his counsel, because it applies still, especially to those of us who have not been pleased to heed it: Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,
Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis
On education. ...
... Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science. ...
- W.H. Auden, "Under Which Lyre," 1946
I am not arguing against method, no more than against money. I do propose that the love of method creates among scholars--and among scholars of schooling and education in particular--a mischief equal to that wrought by the love of money among merchants and industrialists. The distraction leads one to the same end: abandonment of concern with 'the good life'--an object that neither the love of money nor of method can fix upon. Having become an educationist only after a properly liberal--if short, sad, and too early--education in comparative literature and the Western DWEMs classics, and then having farmed for an all-too-brief decade (1973-1983), I am not especially well prepared for the fetishism of method ("methodology").
Nor do I deny that method has value. Craft requires it. But for scholars to confine their observations about education to merely methodical accounts is derelict (as I suppose nearly everyone will admit). This dereliction, I argue, is an expression of the ongoing neglect of liberal education (as fewer people will admit). Anti-intellectualism of this sort (by which I mean a turn away from intellect, not a disparagement of intellectuals who mostly deserve disparagement) is related to the cosmopolitanism that threatens the ground on which humans stand, that is, to their relation to the earth. Daniel Bell writes about the relationship between "the economizing mode" and this derelict project, as do Lasch, Berry, and Barzun. Their views inform the essay with a logic different from the logic that generally prevails among educationists. Again, for plenty of rural examples of this different logic, I refer readers to Paul Theobald's new book. Another source for such connections and purposes is the Rural Challenge, which is actively seeking to cultivate "genuinely rural" education in various ways all over the US (at the moment; its funding persists, I believe for five years). Finally, so far as I know, no one involved in this movement seeks to impose a single model (paradigm or best-system) for properly or genuinely rural education. Some of us (variously) may be happy to see college-going rates decline, to see school refusal rates rise, to welcome shorter school terms, more informal educational settings, or to embrace greater variety of purpose in US schooling. I am inclined myself to believe that most children could learn what they now do in half the time it now takes, if they got more attention from adults, actually produced something in the process of growing up, and were cultivated to undertake responsible action. As it is, they have trouble recalling what filled their days when their parents ask; and this strange disease is nearly universal, from all reports.