A 1981-1982 study of the meaning of fundamental education concentrated on interviewing over 300 lay citizens, pastors, and educators in small rural communities in upstate New York and Vermont and yielded five major findings. First, little oversight or regulatory capability existed to control the fundamentalist school movement. State level governance boards "trusted" local fundamentalist schools to do the right thing. Second, locally diverse fundamentalist schools were localized phenomena with no overall coordination as a socio-political movement. Third, fundamentalist forms of schooling were a policy phenomenon of the 1970's and did not have a long history or strong ties to any well-organized regional or national effort. Consequently, personal preferences were acted upon and personal commitment to the schools was high. Fourth, the fundamentalist purpose seemed to relate Christian spirit to vows of personal and collective poverty for the school community. Fifth, fundamentalist schools rejected direct public subsidy but frequently relied on practices which constituted indirect public subsidy. Although researchers used a variety of conventional sampling, data collection, and analytical techniques, they did not identify a "best" method for this type of study; methodological looseness was necessary because of the highly personalized and contextually constrained nature of the fundamentalist phenomenon. (SB)