Published with a new preface, this innovative case study from Nova Scotia analyzes the relationship between rural communities and contemporary education. Rather than supporting place-sensitive curricula and establishing networks within community populations, the rural school has too often stood apart from local life, with the generally unintended consequence that many educationally successful rural youth come to see their communities and lifestyles as places to be left behind. They face what Michael Corbett calls a mobility imperative, which, he shows, has been central to contemporary schooling. Learning to Leave argues that if education is to be democratic and serve the purpose of economic, social, and cultural development, then it must adapt and respond to the specificity of its locale, the knowledge practices of the people, and the needs of those who struggle to remain in challenged rural places.

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Michael Corbett teaches at Acadia University in Nova Scotia and has studied youth educational decision-making, mobilities and education, the politics of educational assessment, literacies in rural contexts, improvisation and the arts in education, conceptions of space and place, the viability of small rural schools, and wicked policy problems and controversies in education.

“An engrossing, theoretically sophisticated, and important piece of community sociology.”
Rural Sociology

“A major research contribution—one that will join a relatively short list of first-rate books aimed at helping the education research community, as well as the general public, understand the convoluted phenomenon known as rural education.”
Journal of Research in Rural Education