The relationships between student and high school, and school and community in a small, rural Midwestern community ("Mansfield") were documented through on-site interviews, tapes, diaries, and minutes of school board meetings. Mansfield school district contained approximately 2,200 persons and somewhat over 500 students in a kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade system. Using the participant-observer technique, work began in Mansfield in August, 1972, and continued for the next year and a half. Rather than describing the school structure, the study developed through the eyes of the people; students, teachers, parents, board members, and others described their opinions and feelings toward their school and the type of education they received. The material strengthed the theory that the rural school and community are closely related; when the school is removed the community is likely to disappear. Further, although schools are traditionally thought of as places especially for youth, what actually was shown to govern the school setting was an adult group's sense of the elements of survival in a particular culture's terms. Because this was an in-depth study of just one community and school, care was taken not to generalize findings to rural communities across America. There is, however, enough similarity to hundreds of other communities to make certain conclusions about such things as the strong school-community relationship found in most rural communities. (EE)