Using a meta-ethnographic analysis this keynote presentation identifies how rural educational ethnographic researchers have depicted school experiences, curriculum content, and teaching in rural schools and the interests in which these things may operate. How capitalist organizations and entrepreneurs seek out and target natural/geo-capital in profit interests in rural areas, and encourage state investment in local agglomeration to allow them to first create public interest and attract a labour force which they then later freely abandon responsibility for is a key point. Other results concern how rural schools follow a standard banking approach to the national curriculum that marginalizes local rural knowledge, obfuscates structural domination in rural areas, and normalizes the exploitation and later abandonment of workers and existential and environmental conditions in rural areas. Rural populations are schooled rather than educated and empowered in this sense through a normative curriculum that reflects and supports the interests of a predominantly urban and often global capitalist elite. However, though few examples have been identified in the research thus far, teachers and students can transcend these conditions and produce a more micro-revolutionary local curriculum, which the narrative also touches upon. Tourism represents a relatively new feature of capitalist agglomeration and exploitation in rural places, which is also normalized by schooling in capitalist interests there. The keynote questions finally whether we can talk about rural schools under these circumstances, or whether we should make it very clear that schools in rural places exist and function primarily in hegemonic metro-centric largely urban capitalist interests.