The great challenge for rural education scholars is explaining what relevance the rural circumstance might have to schooling, a task especially difficult in the case of mathematics education. This paper argues that the rural lifeworld makes math education rural and suggests implications for research based on that statement. The lifeworld is the fully realized, socially constructed world of everyday life--the realm in which we fashion such meaning for our lives as we are able. That schooling has almost nothing to do with the lifeworld is an intellectual and cultural disaster. Of course, schooling constitutes its own lifeworld, one in which most students dislike math instruction and recognize that the benefits of math are not intended for them. The lifeworld everywhere is being degraded by television and mass marketing; this global tendency makes the backwaters of the world interesting places that harbor possibilities for intellectual development not easily found elsewhere. Entertaining such possibilities requires discarding many beliefs, including claims about the nature of "best practice." Educational research into the separation of lifeworld and schooling requires deep engagement with specific lifeworlds; the rural lifeworld is particularly appealing, having such qualities as land ethic, attachment to place, community, familism, conservatism, and intradependence. Five practical points for math education researchers are: discard deficit models of rural culture, read up on rural issues and dilemmas and social constructivism, do survey research and post-hoc analyses with large data sets, and accommodate the sharp variability of rural places in research designs. (SV)