Chapter 1: Introduction: European Rural Schools and their Communities: “The Stone in Europe’s Shoe?”

This book focuses on educational provision in rural schools and their communities in Europe, and the effects, real or suspected, of national, global, and local forces, upon it. It includes the writing of educational researchers from four former socialist European countries, whose research rarely appears in English. It has been made possible by the improved flow of information around the globe, and the opportunities presented by the European Educational Research Association’s (EERA) annual European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). Locations including Ljubliana, Istanbul, Budapest, and Lisbon have made the conference accessible and affordable for European researchers from low domestic product (GDP) countries. Unusually, too, the book focuses largely on elementary/primary schools; the concentration on primary schooling allows exploration of aspects of educational quality other than performance statistics (see Figure 1.1).