Small and Rural Schools as the Chronotope of Studenting and Educational Encounter

In this paper, I will address the issue of the future of small and rural schools (SRS henceforth) from an educational-theoretical perspective. In particular, the thesis that I am going to explore is whether and to what extent SRSs may represent a model to oppose to what has been recently defined as “product-orientated education” and whether they may embody “an alternative vision incorporating sufficiency, homonomy and emancipation” (Barrow, 2024). My argumentation will unfold in two steps. First, I will suggest understanding the typically modern view of the future of/in education at the crossroads of three interpretive trajectories: Klaus Mollenhauer’s (1986) concept of Bildungszeit as dominated by the logic of progress; Thomas Popkewitz’s (2008) notion of cosmopolitan time; and Robbie McClintock’s (2012) idea of modern schooling as ruled by the “area-mapping” mindset. The educational temporality that thereby emerges arguably finds its contemporary expression in the aforementioned product-orientated education, which frames the future in terms of “expected outcomes" and, more generally, according to principles of manageability. And, secondly, in the more constructive (or simply visionary?) part of the paper, I am going to intimate that SRSs could (or even should) be construed as the chronotope of education taking place and of studenting. Through the phrase “taking place,” which I draw from McClintock, I want to convey a double meaning: on the one hand, the idea of a temporality intimately linked with a sense of place and with that philochoria which Noddings (2013, p. 85) recommends in contemporary scenarios; and, on the other, an existential and lived sense of educational temporality that the project of modern schooling tends to sidestep or repress. In this wake, I will indicate the possibility that SRSs may represent privileged sites of that interweaving of existential and place-based education that Giles Barrow recommends in opposition to product-orientated schooling. In this reading, we should recoil from construing SRSs as learning hubs but we should rather re-conceptualize them as sites for studying and studenting, insofar as the very notion of learning is arguably accomplice with a specific view of temporality. In conclusion, redescribing place in the Latourian terms of “a collective in the process of expanding”, I will raise the question of whether, in their configuration as sites of studying and studenting, SRSs may represent, in a Deweyan vein, the contemporary outposts of creative democracy, which is always a “task ahead of us”.