Abstract
This article synthesizes problems impacting rural primary and secondary schools and describes how schools and relevant organizations have responded to the challenges. Given the context of a globally-compressed world, the focus of the literature review is on international rural education research and strategies. The exploration took the path of topical rather than regional or methodological investigation of rural education for the purpose of thematic understanding of issues. The paper opens with a discussion of the ambiguity of the definition of “rural” to reinforce an epistemological challenge with rural education research. An adaptation of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory is used as a framework for the literature review; rural education challenges are synthesized into macro-, mezzo-, and micro-systemic level issues. The paper culminates by positing that rural education issues require inter-sectoral and collaborative responses.
Highlights
At the launch of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (United Nations 2010a) on the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (United Nations Development Programme, n.d.), United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon argued that education “should never be an accident of circumstance” (¶ 4)
These are presented as persistent issues in documents of international organizations committed to rural education, such as Education for All (United Nations, 2010a)
The world economic crisis has reinforced our global interdependence and the need to consider the impact of local decisions as well as a collective response to challenges
Summary
This article synthesizes problems impacting rural primary and secondary schools and describes how schools and relevant organizations have responded to the challenges. Given the context of a globally-compressed world, the focus of the literature review is on international rural education research and strategies. I focused on out-migration, gender inequity, poverty, declining student enrolment, staffing of teachers, remoteness, indigenous populations and curriculum relevancy These are presented as persistent issues in documents of international organizations committed to rural education, such as Education for All (United Nations, 2010a). Rural schools face a constellation of context-specific challenges and conditions (Provasnik, et al, 2007; World Bank, 2000), and while these issues in rural education are numerous and complex, the recurrence of the factors mentioned in the 2010 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (United Nations, 2010a) suggest certain challenges are central and most pressing. A final section entitled, “Rural Education: No Longer Only Educators’ Concern” describes the increasingly inter-sectoral and collaborative ways in which rural education issues are being addressed
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