What “Being from the Country” Taught Me: Reflections on the Phenomenon of My Rural Education

By Dr. Charles Lowery

This blog article was originally published by the Center for Rural Education at Virginia Tech.

April 4, 2023

Where I grew up and went to school, being rural meant “being from the country.” And, for me, being from the country carried with it the meaning of education. Often people think of rural as a synonym for unrefined, rustic, redneck—all meant to denote uneducated. But in my experience, this was far from reality. Whether I was in the garden helping my grandpa pick tomatoes or in the pasture helping my father corral cattle, I was engaged in learning. This was not a specific type of learning, that is, it was not singular in nature. It was an ecological education. The cow pasture was what my grandfather called his church where he felt closest to God—but for me, I called the same land my classroom where I encountered various intelligences and the ways of knowing the world. Yes, it certainly had the connotations of bucolic ranches and rolling rows of watermelon and potatoes, of people given to a simple approach to living and a common-sense orientation. But the land was also geography and geology, the science of agriculture; and the people were engaged in a praxis of active reflection and thoughtful intellectual activity.

The rurality of being from the country prepared me for school and for learning, and it became foundational to life and living. Flows and erosion seen in the rivers and creek beds on our land became metaphors for economics and human migration patterns. It was there I learned about measurement. Multiplying length times width to find area while helping my father building chicken coops transferred quickly to math class. As did learning about volume by calculating how many bales of hay would fit in the haybarn and learning the Pythagorean theorem by watching my grandfather square the corner posts while fencing in a new section of pastureland.

Ecology and ecosystems were witnessed firsthand down at the cattle pond, or while taking walks down the backroads and out by the nearby bayou. My fundamental exposure to ecological systems theory was when as a child I experienced the insects and the unseen of country organism, the earth teeming with life through mutualism and symbiosis, cooperation and commensalism. Crows and cranes, toads and turtles, moss and meadows—all part of my world of life and learning. The biodiversity of the country taught me the importance of the diversity of humanity, and not only the importance but the necessity of it. Everything came together in an interdependent dance of life and cycles of the seasons.

That said, we cannot forget or ignore that loving one’s country also means respecting the rules, regulations, and responsibilities that delineate the inherent and necessary connections of the people to the land. Our founders equated the right to own property with the pursuit of happiness. As Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote over a decade ago in The Atlantic,

Jefferson declared that the pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right, along with life and liberty. The story goes that Jefferson, on the advice of Benjamin Franklin, substituted the phrase “pursuit of happiness” for the word “property,” which was favored by George Mason. Franklin thought that “property” was too narrow a notion.

Property—land ownership—was too narrow a notion, yes. As Wendell Berry wrote, “In the mind of Thomas Jefferson, farming, education, and democratic liberty were indissolubly linked.” But Franklin’s suggested revision still spoke to a connection that existed between contentment and the land, between one’s happiness and security and the perimeters and parameters of the earth in which we dwell. In 1950, psychologist Perry London asserted,

Insecurity is a springboard to national and international discontent, and thus to war. The true clue to the elimination of that evil lies in the equal right to the land which God has given all [humanity]. The recognition of this right is the greatest single contribution that society can make to the physical and emotional well-being of humanity, and to the individual happiness and security of [people].

In a 2019 study by Furuyashiki and others, it was found that “‘forest bathing’ (Shinrin-yoku) has positive physiological effects, such as blood pressure reduction, improvement of autonomic and immune functions, as well as psychological effects of alleviating depression and improving mental health.” Another bit of evidence that there exists an inseparable bond between the people and the land in which and on which they live.

If so, we should each be custodians and stewards of the land and by extension of the happiness of all citizens. But to accomplish this we have to recognize some of the basic tenets of ecological education that country living and learning taught me.

Capitalism depends on economic exchanges, such as money for merchandise and manufactured goods. These are fundamental Producer – Consumer interactions. Words like commerce, currency, and competition imply flows of capital and depend on human reactions and responses (more so than human reasoning and responsibility at times). Religion is framed by ecumenical and ecclesiastical exchanges. Repentance and forgiveness; giving and receiving; sacrifice for salvation. Morality for immortality. Similarly, the various fields of computing and construction take into account exchanges related to systems and subsystems of energy, electronics, equipment, equations, and engineering.

Austrican physicist, Fritjof Capra stated, “The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.” If so, then the obverse side of the coin must also true: We cannot learn the benefits of life until we recognize that you and I and the land are also inherently bound together. If Capra sees the interconnectedness of problems, so too can we discover the advantages and strengths in our interdependence. As Whitman, a scholar of rurality in his own right, mused,

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far

Whitman’s notion of “physiology from top to toe” speaks to our democratic interdependence as citizens. This again is a great lesson I learned from growing up country. So many see rural life as a mode of independent living when in fact the lessons of country living teach us the complete antithesis. Too many associate rurality with isolation and insular living. But rurality—the country—really means being connected and democratically dependent on one another. In Democracy and Education, Dewey stated,

From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; [but] it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.

Even the major rivers of our land do not exist without numerous and significant tributaries that contribute to their continued existence and force. The majestic birds do not thrive without the lowly insects. Just like the Farm-to-Market highways of rural East Texas connect the towns to the backwoods communities, like the one I grew up in, we are connected to one another in our connectedness to the land. Our rights are unalienable and, when we pay attention to what nature teaches us, so are we. So too should we recognize our responsibility to care for the source of our learning—the land. Our lives are not independent, isolated existences, but instead, as my rural education taught me, we are social animals, ecologically bound, and in desperate need of one another, to care for one another and to care for the land that sustains us. Only in acknowledging and accepting this interrelatedness can we work together to remediate the suffering of our world.

Charles L. Lowery, Ed.D., is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the School of Education at Virginia Tech and a proud product of Possum Walk, Texas. He provided the photos for this post.

To subscribe to the Center for Rural Education at Virginia Tech's blog, click here.