During industrialization production industries tended to become increasingly concentrated with this stimulating urbanization and the growth of cities with high population density. These environments became understood as the norm for capitalist production economies and consequently the schools in them also became the pivot of educational research and policy. Education sociology became an urban subject primarily and the problems of urban intensive schools were the main focus.  In this chapter we use experiences, theories and concepts from a recently completed research project on Rural youth – education, place and participation (VR 2013-2142, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2014 - 2017) that was carried out in six schools in six different rural areas and involved 340 hours of classroom observations as well as field conversations and formal interviews with pupils (68 boys and 68 girls) and staff at the schools. 

Researching with local people in rural spaces and places helped us to transcend the limits imposed on our knowledge of educational social relations by dominant metro-centric hegemonies. It helped us to identify positive understandings of local value and how people carve out personally meaningful places for education in relation to their lives, values and ambitions. Yet we have to acknowledge that the values that seem to develop from education consumption are still extremely unevenly dispersed across the social whole according to social class factors and the availability of economic and other useful forms of capital and that social reproduction in and through educational interchanges is as much of a characteristic of rural education production and consumption as it is in urban areas. 

Taken together the results may suggest the beginnings of a crisis of democracy in some rural areas today that can be linked to increased levels of experienced frustration and alienation and the much documented rise of right-wing populist party support in the former industrialised and now de-industrialising rural towns of our once internationally renowned welfare state.