I realized we were different, really different, on a rainy morning in 1987. I was in an assembly at the 1960s shoddy built concrete comprehensive school in our local town . . . listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. . . . I argued with our dumbfounded headmaster that school was really a prison and "an infringement of my human rights." He looked at me strangely, and said, "But what would you do at home?" Like this was an impossible question to answer. "I'd work on the farm," I answered, equally amazed that he couldn't see how simple this was. He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, told me to stop being ridiculous and go away. . . . Plenty of us were bright enough, but we had no intention of displaying it in school. It would have been dangerous, (pp. 3-5)
Teachers were selling an enemy ideology: the supposed need to leave everything one loves in order "to be somebody" Rebanks continued:
My [paternal] grandfather was born in 1918 into a fairly anonymous and unexceptional farming family . . . He was, and we his descendants remain, essentially nobodies as far as anyone else is concerned. But that's the point. Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. . . . This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies, (pp. 18-19)
The teachers weren't interested, and so Rebanks described his high school self as belonging to a group of mischievous "lads" devoted to doing as much damage in school as possible. The enemy—schooling and teachers—had earned it, after all. To be sure, the enemy ideology is not about the practices of reading, writing, problem solving, logic, and critique. These are practices for everyone, as Rebanks discovered with no help from his high school. Rebanks effectively left school at age 12 and withdrew altogether as soon as legally possible.
At this juncture in the story (Rebanks, 2015), his readers were left wondering how a youngster who hated school so much might have learned to write so well. It was all predictably accidental. It was actually three accidents. First, he discovered his maternal grandfather's books and read them; they were good books, and they helped him make sense of the entire world, including his own part of it. Second, he'd been observing his sisters do well in school; the enemy ideology was okay for them. Third, after arguing seriously with his father, he concluded he'd have to do something else than farm sheep for a while. At age 21, he enrolled at the local adult education center to prepare for his A-level exams (equivalent to the GED route in the United States): "It was fairly easy if you'd read the books I had" (p. 143).
The rest of the story took Rebanks to university (Oxford), into a relationship with a woman who wanted to farm with him, back to the farm, and to the part-time, off-farm employment needed by most contemporary farm families. The meaning of his and his family's and community's lives comes from their rural place and their work in it. Reading and thinking have enriched his commitments to place, family, and community—and to similar realities worldwide.
Rebanks's (2015) experiences demonstrate that reading, writing, logic, and critique are practices that naturally apply to enacting and elaborating engagement with life in local places: to thinking oneself rural. They help one live a better and wiser life both publicly and privately.
Observe, though, that an appreciation for nobodies (i.e., ordinary working people) does not mean that reading, writing, logic, and critique are necessary for living a good life. Still, it's unsettling that so few people do what so many people otherwise might (i.e., read, write, reason, and critique). Rural schooling ought, in theory, to help cultivate these practices widely in rural communities. To do so, schooling would need to take the side of rural communities. Instead, rural schools typically take the side of national manpower needs and end up sponsoring the rural "brain drain" (Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007; Paul & Seward, 2016).
Possibly, many rural educators in the United States are themselves challenged to grasp what it takes to help students think themselves rural. They may not see value in rural ways of living nor understand the processes of reading, writing, reasoning, and formulating critique required to think oneself rural. Part of the challenge is the widespread failure to understand that working with hands and body requires a lot of thinking (especially reasoning). Builders, farmers, and mechanics of all sorts know that it does (Crawford, 2009; Rose, 2014).
Rural counselors and teachers can, however, learn to appreciate (and help others appreciate) the intellectual side of manual labor and, in doing so, learn to take the side of the nobodies. They can also learn to connect reading, writing, and critique (as well as reasoning) to the consideration of rural life. Bomer (2017) called this approach "culturally sustaining pedagogy":
Culturally sustaining pedagogy requires . . . that we take an appreciative stance—finding and foregrounding the resources [students] already have, such as their language and what they can do with it, their knowledge of stories and characters, their expanding expertise about varied things in the world, and the wealth of relationships that both sustain and challenge them. (p. 13)
For rural counselors and teachers, efforts to think oneself rural provide a good starting point for working with able students in rural schools. To explore this outlook, educators need first to affirm their own rural upbringing and experience. They need to acknowledge what it means to be a nobody oneself and, like Rebanks (2015), to recognize the virtue of that standpoint. This is a difficult proposition for anyone, but especially for educators in the United States, where being a somebody seems so important. It means, for the vast majority, unlearning what they've been misled to think is virtuous. Nevertheless, as Li (2006) claimed in his discussion of the aims of environmental education,
The cultivation of humility as a civic virtue could play a key role in sustaining collaborative efforts to develop inclusive and integrative environmental education. Humility as...
