Assimilation, Resistance, Rapprochement, and Loss: Response to Woodrum, Faircloth, Greenwood, and Kelly

In this article, the author offers his responses to the commentaries made by Arlie Woodrum (2009), Susan Faircloth (2009), David Greenwood (2009), and Ursula Kelly (2009) on his book "Learning to Leave," as well as his article, "Rural Schooling in Mobile Modernity: Returning to the Places I've Been." Each of the commentators speaks to questions of educational equity. While the large conversation around equity has been in motion for some decades now, the author asserts that there is considerable evidence that schools continue to reinforce and contribute to multiple forms of social inequity much as they always have. The author concludes by suggesting that one might take heed of Ulrich Beck and Arjun Appadurai's sense of the cosmopolitan in rural education. By cosmopolitanism means that while one lives physically in some place, it is still possible to achieve many forms of connection to other places and spaces in addition to (rather than instead of) more strictly local connections.