The school contents and the idealization of the rural environment. School textbooks and common sense in the definition of rural space

Abstract

Social representation is a theory that has been applied to rurality and structures social thought based on dialogues between scientific knowledge and common-sense knowledge and influences the decisions that are adopted in social life. Academic rural geography and other social sciences have developed studies on the reality of rural spaces, their changes and problems, while common sense knowledge is manifested in school geography with a patent idealization of the contents of rurality. This common sense knowledge is the one that exerts the most influence on the social representation of rurality, manifesting itself in the opinions and attitudes of the students. The application of mixed research methods has revealed the structure and meaning of the representation of rural spaces among a sample of 581 secondary school students from three areas (rural, peri-urban and urban) in the province of Valencia. The content of the textbooks and the teaching strategies of the teachers show the anchoring in the idealization of rural spaces, according to the gradation of worldviews of rurality that graduate the understanding of rural spaces from the social structure of the geographical space.