Early political struggles over principles of governance culminated in our "commercially competitive civil society" in which numbers equate with power, resulting in disempowerment of rural people, decreasing rural influence on public policy, and consequent irrelevant education in rural communities. Education can provide the basis for a…

The theme for this conference was "Our Town and Country Society Looks at Itself." The following papers were presented at this conference: (1) "The Miracle of Production--Can We Keep It" (Aubrey D. Gates); (2) "Recent U.S. Population Trends and Their Causes" (Calvin L. Beale and Donald J. Bogue); (3) "Commercial…

This paper differentiates between the "old story" of rural education and the emerging "new story." It describes the tradition (old story) in which rural education is related to the local and national economies and lays out fragments of the new story, a paradigm that combines rural education and the rural economy in a way that strengthens them…