Rural communities face a dilemma in their efforts to keep pace with knowledge developments. Their remoteness makes access to knowledge of the outside world difficult, time-consuming, and costly. At the same time, the fact that there is access of a sort can mean that local knowledge becomes lost or discarded as somehow inferior. The pervasiveness…

Despite increased government investments in education, West Virginia continues to have one of the nation's highest high school dropout rates and is among the states with the highest unemployment rates. Human capital theory provides the conceptual basis for evaluating the relationship between investment in education and economic development. An…

If a new and effective rural policy is to be crafted, policymakers must realize that rural America has changed a great deal in recent years. To be sustainable, rural policy must be flexible enough to accommodate continuing changes in global structure; be sufficiently targeted to address the unique concerns found in diverse rural situations;…

This paper suggests that current paradigms and world views guiding research for social action are inadequate for directing rural community change in a high-tech, global community. For several generations, the agrarian and industrial paradigms have been accepted as appropriate for guiding social change and development. However, there are problems…

The Rural Development Distance Learning and Training Strategy targets locally recruited field staff of the World Bank Rural Sector. Field staff at the bank's mission offices worldwide are heterogeneous in terms of culture, ethnicity, race, gender, social class, and religion. However, they have the following in common: they follow the Bank's work…

Changes in today's technology make it necessary for library administrators to look anew at the role, the mission, and the future of the public library. Economic development and education strategists recognize three types of rural communities--rural poor, traditional middle America, and communities in transition--each with different values,…

Several trends indicate that rural America can benefit from information-based and service sector job creation. Among the more significant trends are the movement of people from urban and suburban to rural areas, the decreasing importance of location due to communication technology, the growth of jobs in the service section, the growing…

This paper identifies and describes development of rural sociological research in the southern United States. It traces the emergence of rural sociology as a discipline from recognition of problems of rural life in the early 1900's, points out that the northern United States predominated in early research, and discusses why early rural…

Efforts related to rural development, observed in central Africa, focus on the physical with little concern for social and psychological change. Highly funded programs, including those sponsored by the United States, are providing roads, markets, schools, public buildings, etc., and the lifestyles of the native population reflect these…

This paper borrows from the idea of human capital (investment in people's skills and abilities) and the notion that increased human capital can, and should, play a larger role in rural development. Although there are arguments against focusing too narrowly on locality in education, locality development is a frame of reference in this paper. It is…

The idea that education is connected to economic development and that the economy can be strengthened by strengthening education has become a cornerstone of the 1980s educational reform movement. The basic idea linking education and the economy is not new. Americans have invested in education with the expectation that it would yield substantial…

In six parts, this paper highlights the significance of environmental education (EE) and its contributions to national development in developing countries and in Kenya in particular. Sections 1 and 2 provide an overview of environmental problems and the history of worldwide environmental education, respectively. Sections 3 and 4 review the basic…

Great changes are occurring in the vast and extremely diverse nonmetropolitan regions of the United States as a result of economic and social shifts taking place. These are not the only issues facing state and local education policy and planning communities. Nationwide focus on the school reform and school excellence movement poses another serious…

Three intermountain communities in Colorado and Utah were studied to determine the impact of rapid development on residents of rural communities, especially on their views of the world and their personal well-being, and to assess the degree to which energy boomtowns experience the social disruption suggested in the classical boomtown studies. Two…

Consequences of population turnaround for rural economic development are examined in a 9-county region of Northern Lower Michigan. Data from census reports and 374 usable responses to a questionnaire mailed to a random sample of property owners drawn from 1982 county tax assessment rolls were used to test competing hypotheses about rural…