Learning to leave : the irony of schooling in a coastal community

Corbett, Michael John 1958- (author.).

Summary: Departure and loss are recurring themes for those who study and live within rural society. Rather than building and supporting communities, many current educational practices may actually contribute to rural depopulation and decline. Prevailing ideas of standardized curriculum, programs and tests render schools irrelevant for large numbers of young people attending schools in rural, northern and coastal communities. In this case study, Corbett shows that some rural youth accrue educational mobility capital that disconnects them from their homes and families. For most of those who remain, formal education is understood as an alien, impractical and progressively abstract space. If education in rural communities is about leaving, then policymakers ought to support transitions for rural youth and for their communities. If not, then educational programming ought to address the needs of the majority who remain close to home in places that stubbornly refuse to die. Is it possible that schools can do both? Working with the tension between the global and the local, and between staying and leaving, this study explores the problematic connection between education and outmigration.

Record details

ISBN: 9781552662298
Physical Description: print
297 pages ; 23 cm.
Publisher: Halifax [N.S.] : Fernwood Pub., 2006.
Copyright: ©2007

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 276-290) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

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 -- 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 -- Who stays, who goes and where: education and migration on Digby Neck, 1963-1998 -- The economy -- Education levels -- Mobility -- The education/mobility connection -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- Place matters -- Migration, education and ambivalence: mobility capital -- Ambiguity, mobility and resistance -- Resistances -- Rural schooling and community.