If you’ve been in one rural community…

October 23rd, 2009 by Mike Knutson

Distinguished sociologist Daryl Hobbs frequently told me and fellow Miner County (SD) residents, “If you’ve been in one rural community, you’ve only been in one rural community.” Hobbs issued that warning to remind us that each small town held its own distinguishing features. Just because we heard of one community’s problems on the TV news, didn’t mean we should assume those same problems existed in our community. For that reason, he challenged us (and other rural community leaders) to dig in and understand the nuances of what made our community unique.

I was reminded of Hobb’s exhortation today while reading a book review of Hollowing out the Middle, a book I highly recommend. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the reviewer offered a lukewarm assessment of the book’s value to rural leaders.

In the review, he also leveled one scathing criticism over the authors’ claims that small town schools in the Heartland are divided along socio-economic lines. The reviewer writes:

The authors are on shakier ground discussing Ellis itself. You cannot drop into a town for a year and come away with deep understandings. Their claim that “there is probably no other place in American society where the rules of class and status play out with a more brutal efficiency than in the world of a country high school” is so howlingly inaccurate that only displaced urban academics could believe it.

The reviewer’s statement drew my attention because I too struggled with veracity of the author’s claims on this subject. As a former teacher, I feel comfortable saying the divide was not as severe (as the authors maintain) in the two rural South Dakota schools where I taught. I can site numerous examples of quite the opposite, where students rise above the challenges presented by the status of their birth.

So how can the authors, claim be so far off from my personal experiences? Perhaps it’s because they base their analysis of the rural Heartland largely from interviews in one rural community. And if you’ve been to one rural community, you’ve only been to one rural community.

But divisions along socio-economic lines did, and I suspect still do, exist in the schools and communities where I taught. And Hollowing out the Middle helped me see those relationships in a new light. For instance, I know that one of the greatest advantages that rural education offers over an urban one is that teachers are able to get to know the parents of their students on a much deeper level. After reading the book, however, I can’t help but wonder how I and other fellow teachers might have imposed conditions of the parents onto their children.

Some readers will undoubtedly be offended by the author’s claims. But I don’t think they intend the claim as a condemnation. Rather, they intended it as a tool for helping us examine what lies beneath the surface of our behaviors.

Therein lays the value offered by the book. While I can’t agree that “the rules of class and status play out with a more brutal efficiency” in the rural towns and schools that I’ve experienced, I know that elements of it exist in all of our rural schools in the Heartland. And I think that every community could develop a richer understanding of itself by holding a conversation on the subject.

So let me conclude by asking, “Do you think socio-economic divisions are as pervasive in your rural school as the authors suggest?” Is that a conversation you are willing to have?

Photo Credit: Alexandraless - Flickr (Let’s hope young people don’t jump for joy at the prospect of leaving rural communities after graduation.)

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