Chapter 4: Literacy Education for the Lumps and Divots of Smart Cities and Rural Places

We are reading educators in the middle of Pennsylvania, the state with the third highest rural population. In this chapter, we outline our fears that neoliberal urbancentric policies position rural citizens (and many other groups) as servants of concentrated innovation ecosystems where an elite, highly educated populace will invent the future. We begin with Friedman’s candid call to redirect the distribution of resources from rural areas to urban ecosystems in order to save the middle class, and we follow the broadband wires and waves to rural schools where reading education is to be reduced to direct instruction of basic skills. We understand these actions as unjust because they reinforce institutional obstacles, limiting rural citizens’ participatory parity with others in American and global democratic projects.