Keep Your Doors Open
Shaping the Future
HOW ARE ORDINARY RESIDENTS OF SMALL TOWNS shaping the future of their communities? Are they encouraging their children to stay—if not in their own town, then in some other community like it? Or are contemporary residents—like previous generations—instilling aspirations in their offspring that can only be realized in cities and suburbs? Essentially the question is one of basic values. It may not be surprising that people who have chosen to spend their lives in small places make the best of it—talking about how much they enjoy their friends and neighbors, reveling in the warm greetings of passersby, showing up week after week at the same place of worship, and basking in good-spirited agreement about moral and political issues. But do they value small-town life enough to tell their children they should stay?
The answer, frankly, is no. If small-town residents were successfully arguing that the next generation should stay close by, these communities would be considerably larger than they are. Current residents themselves, as we have seen, seldom say they opted to live where they do because of pressures from parents or grandparents. One does not have to read too closely between the lines to see that residents were guided by circumstances as much as deeply held values. This was where the family farm happened to be located. It was the place that had an opening for a teacher or doctor. An aging relative became ill and needed care. This was where a boyfriend lived. Housing was cheap.
Enough of these circumstances work in their favor that most small towns will survive. Population growth nationwide has been sufficient to repopulate small towns, even if most of this growth occurs in large metropolitan areas. That does not mean small towns can move successfully into the future without strategic planning. The adage that standing still means moving backward holds true. For good reason, town leaders work at attracting new jobs and workers, better roads, and community improvements.
But in this chapter, I want to focus on the future that small-town residents are encouraging the coming generation to seek. If loyalty to the community itself is not that important, what is? Is it simply that the individualistic American success ethic prevails? That would be the most likely explanation. After all, social observers have long held that however much Americans might talk about community spirit, they are nearly always willing to sacrifice that spirit on the altar of getting ahead. Or is there something subtler at work? Are there perhaps understandings of what is significant in life that are not so different in small towns than anywhere else, and yet that cast the relationship between individuals and their communities in a different light?
From listening closely to residents of small towns talking about what they would do over if they could—and from considering what parents, grandparents, teachers, and clergy say they consider important to advise young people—my conclusion is that the continuing role people envision themselves and their communities playing is more complex than commonly supposed. Parents want to rectify the shortcomings of their own decisions, even if they do not regret the lives they have made for themselves. They recognize the constraints as well as advantages of living in small towns. Higher education is generally valued, as are hard work and good planning. And yet the aim of it all is less to get ahead—at least if that means the usual rewards of success in a career—and more to experience as much as life has to offer. That means taking risks, experimenting, moving out of one’s comfort zone, and gaining maturity. On the way, a sojourner does not leave the community behind as much as take it along. Its values are internalized, just as the childhood habits instilled in home and hearth have always been. But crucially, as learning and maturity are understood to take longer, and parents and grandparents live longer and more easily stay in communication, the community literally remains active whether close at hand or at a distance.
THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLEGE
To begin to see how what I have just described gains expression in real life, the place to start is with the most commonly understood means of getting ahead: going to college. Whether they themselves went to college or not, nearly everyone we talked to in small towns thinks it is a good idea these days for young people to go to college if they possibly can. This is sometimes true of residents who were unable to attend college themselves, and is especially common among people who did attend college.1
What residents recognize is that young people who go away to college are less likely to return than those who do not seek college training. An indication of the difference is evident in figure 10.1, which shows the probability of young people living in a different state from the one in which they were born. Among fifteen-year-olds living in nonmetropolitan areas, the probability of having moved from their birth state is about one in four. The probably rises to about three in ten by the time young people who have not graduated from college reach age twenty-two, but it is seven points higher for young people of the same age who have graduated from college. Furthermore, the probability of having left one’s birth state continues to rise among college graduates, reaching 45 percent by the end of people’s thirties, whereas the probability stabilizes at 33 percent for young adults who have not graduated from college. In all likelihood, the differences would be even larger if comparisons could be made including residents who grew up in nonmetropolitan settings and currently live in metropolitan areas.2
Figure 10.1 Geographic mobility by education
For those who have been to college and have been able to remain in a small town, it is at least conceivable that the next generation may be able to do the same. I was struck by this possibility when listening to Olaf Hennink, a fifty-year-old chemist, talking about his experiences and the advice he would give. Mr. Hennink was raised on a farm but knew by the time he started high school that he wanted to go to college. He majored in chemistry and went immediately to a master’s program at a university in another state. Being away from his home community and ambivalent about his plans, he returned home and farmed for several years with his father. When the farm economy went south, he found a job working for a large chemical-processing company in a small town about twenty miles away.
The advice that Mr. Hennink says he would give someone graduating from high school in his town is to “go to a good college and get at least a master’s degree in a scientific field.” The reason to do this, he explains, is that a person “needs the credentials to get a good job and be satisfied with it.” He has two sons and a daughter. The oldest son has followed his father’s counsel, majoring in mechanical engineering and now working at a manufacturing firm in his parents’ hometown. The second son has gone off to another state to college. His return is more doubtful. The daughter is still in high school.
Others were less certain that a college-educated young person would be likely to live in a small town, but considered higher education imperative nonetheless. A teacher in an unincorporated village of fewer than a hundred residents observed that neither of his parents had gone to high school and it had taken him more than a dozen years attending classes part-time to finish college. His dream for his three children is that they all complete at least a college degree.
In few instances are there any explicit concerns that a young person from a small town might be incapable of succeeding in college. There is, however, recognition of the difficulties that might be involved. For example, a teacher living in a town of six thousand notes the tension that a young person in her community might face between wanting to start a family and taking the time to get an education. “I would advise getting as much education as you can before you settle,” she says, “because once you settle down, then you have other obligations.” Psychological issues, such as doubting one’s capabilities, might also pose difficulties. A financial consultant in a town of seven hundred, for instance, emphasizes the need to “have self-confidence to go forward for an education.” She considers it important not to be intimated by the fact that there are “a lot of very smart, well-educated people in this world.”3
There are of course exceptions to the view that young people should go to college. Parents and educators in small towns are realistic enough to know that college is not for everyone. “For some people, trade school is going to be the answer and probably more useful than college,” observed a farmer in one of the towns we visited. That was especially true in his community, which was too small to employ more than a handful of college graduates. A school superintendent in a town of four thousand had the same opinion. “Not everybody needs to go to college,” he said. “There are a lot of good jobs out there, opportunities that technical schools and trade schools can provide. A woman who ran an art studio and gallery in another town felt a person nowadays should think twice about going to college because the cost is so high. Her husband thought spending a few years in the military learning to be subservient was a wise choice.
None of these people explicitly offered the view that college is less important for someone growing up in a small town than for a person living in a city. They likely would have denied that notion. Implicit in some of their remarks, though, was the fact that they themselves knew it was possible to make a good life in a small town without a college education, and that knowledge filtered into their perceptions of what it might take for a young person to be happy. Their frame of reference simply focused on the value of other experiences and skills besides college.
A further example is Betty Lundberg, a sixty-year-old mother of two who lives in a town of eight hundred and is married to a farmer who raises cattle. Mrs. Lundberg’s dream growing up was to become an airline stewardess and see the world. She never imagined becoming a farmer’s wife. But she and her husband-to-be started dating in high school, married soon after, and then worked for a few years in a town of thirteen thousand before taking over his father’s farm. If she could have, she says that the one thing she would have done differently is grow up on a farm instead of in town. She thinks farm children learn more skills and gain greater self-confidence. But she is basically satisfied with her life, and feels that the sewing and cooking classes she took in high school along with what she has learned over the years being a wife and mother have been sufficient.
Mrs. Lundberg’s thoughts, when asked what she would do now if she were graduating from high school and thinking about the future, turn back to what she actually did. “I’d probably do the same thing again,” she says. She would go to town and earn money to get married. Unlike many of the people we talked to, she does not say that she would go to college, even though her parents had lived in a college town and her dad’s income would have made tuition possible. The one thing she would have done differently would have been to save more money. That would have come in handy, she comments, because “farming isn’t very profitable.”
Later on, after talking more about her family and community, Mrs. Lundberg’s views about why she would do things pretty much the same become clearer. She loves her town, and being able to walk up and down the streets with the knowledge of who lives in every house. She is glad that her children, now grown, live in small towns—one nearby, and the other an hour and a half away. She regrets it when “kids get out of school [and] don’t stay.” They “go to a bigger town,” she says. “Some of them like to go to big towns, but I don’t care for a big town.”
PITFALLS TO AVOID
While it is true that many people in small towns who have not been to college instinctively point to higher education as the ticket to a better future, it is crucial to recognize that going or not going is not, in their minds, simply a matter of making the right decision about getting an education. Life is more complicated than that. Other considerations come more significantly into play. The decision not to go to college may not have been an option at all. If one were to do it over or give advice to a young person, these other considerations would be more important.
Living in a small community, residents contend, is generally favorable in terms of the values and experiences it provides to young people, but—perhaps because they view it as a sheltered space—a small town is also fraught with pitfalls. “You are who you are with” is how a mother in a town of five thousand summarizes it. For a young person, that is especially true. The worst dangers are present in the friends who drink, use drugs, or engage in other risky activities—ranging from merely carousing around and doing poorly in school, to engaging in promiscuous sex or breaking the law. Apart from these serious perils, residents often mention the ill effects of ordinary circumstances that limit young people’s opportunities.
The story Sue Pollard, a woman in her early fifties who lives in a town of five thousand, tells reveals one line of thinking in which circumstances dominate. She was one of eleven children. Her parents lived in a small foothills community, where her father worked as a mechanic. Money was clearly too tight for any of the children to consider going to college. Yet perhaps surprisingly, Mrs. Pollard thinks she could have gone to a community college or state university, working and paying her own way, had it not been for the cultural norms that prevailed in her community.
“All of us girls,” she recalls, referring to her sisters and friends in school, “worried about what boys were looking at us.” During grade school, she fantasized about becoming a rancher or teacher, but those ideas were short lived. “We got interested in boys and that kind of went out the window,” she says. By her first year in high school, her dream was “to be married and have two children.” She and her future husband began dating her senior year in high school, and then got married a month after graduating.
If she were doing it over, Mrs. Pollard says that she “would have gone to college and not gotten married right out of high school.” She did eventually take some college classes, but she adds, “The longer I put it off, the more frightening it was.” The advice she would give today, if she had girls, is simply don’t plan your life around a man. “Look after yourself first and don’t get sidetracked by the boys.”
Mrs. Pollard was hardly alone in stressing the importance of thinking for oneself instead of getting married too quickly and following a man around. To some extent, this sentiment reflects the fact that women and men her age did marry younger than is true now. Although early marriage was probably as common in cities and suburbs as in small towns, the fishbowl in which teenagers who went to small high schools lived undoubtedly added to the pressure. When serious dating routinely took place in high school, a young person without a mate by graduation could fear that time was running out.
Small-town norms against having an abortion or acquiring a reputation as a slut may have also encouraged early marriage. In any case, the advice that small-town residents say they would follow if given a chance to do things differently is frequently to focus less on dating and early marriage. “Oh my,” a woman in her early fifties who grew up in a small town and now lives in a city says, “I would say, ‘Stop messing around with that guy! Slow down a bit. Take it easy.’ ”
This advice likely stems from more than just personal experience. Living in a small town, it is easier for residents to know about young people in their community who marry early and do not go on to college for that reason. Marrying early is not the norm, but when it occurs, it stands out. US Census data show that 17 percent of women and 7 percent of men ages sixteen through twenty-one living in nonmetropolitan areas are married or have been married at least once. Controlling statistically for differences in age, race, and gender, the odds within this age group of being married or having been married are at least two-thirds higher in nonmetropolitan areas than in metropolitan ones.4
The potential effect of early marriage on college attainment is illustrated by the data summarized in figure 10.2. The data are from the US Census, selected to include persons ranging in age from sixteen through twenty-one living in nonmetropolitan areas at the time the census was taken. For comparison purposes, data are shown for the 1960 census, which was taken at a time when relatively few Americans attended college, and the 1990 census, when a much larger number attended college and before the Census Bureau changed its definitions of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan. In 1960, the odds of a young man who was married having completed at least one year of college were only a quarter of the odds of that being the case for a young man who had not been married (accounting for differences in age and race). Among women, being married reduced the odds even further—to about an eighth compared with women who were not married. By 1990, early marriage was less likely to suppress the odds of going to college, but only marginally so. The odds of having some college among young men who were married were about a third as large as among young men who were not married. Among young women, the odds were about a quarter as large among those who were married than among those who were not married.5
Figure 10.2 Effects of early marriage on college attainment
These data suggest that residents of small towns who worry about the ill effects of early marriage for going to college may not be overreacting by very much if they base their concerns on their own experiences or what their parents said to them a few decades ago. In that era, early marriage dramatically reduced the chances of going on to college, especially for women. The concerns that residents express now continue to be well founded. Although it is relatively rare, early marriage significantly reduces the chances that a young man or woman will go to college, or at least will postpone doing so.
Besides early marriage, the most frequently mentioned pitfall to avoid is narrow-mindedness—a trait that residents associate with living in a small community. As one woman put it, if she had it to do over again, she would try to “not be so narrow minded and not pigeonhole” herself. Another woman said that she had in mind becoming a cosmetologist and never thought about anything else. A farmer’s son said he would have liked geology, but never gave enough thought to that as a career option. Some of the people who felt they had closed off their opportunities prematurely blamed themselves. They thought it was their fault, perhaps be cause they were teenagers with little experience, or were too eager for the security of a job and home. Others, though, attributed their lack of insight to the community. As the woman who said she had pigeonholed herself explained, “I was totally unaware of the possibilities there for my life. I didn’t have any female role models doing those things.”
We asked people what they thought the best way to avoid or overcome narrow-mindedness or a lack of insight might be. One of the clergy we talked to gave a particularly good answer. Having grown up in a small town, he said he felt as if he had “life wrapped up” because he knew everyone in town and had friends he’d known since they played together in diapers. But going away to college and then seminary jolted him out of his comfort zone. He acknowledges the importance of being open minded, but denies that simply deciding to think broadly is enough. He suggests a threefold approach. First, “pursue your goals and your dreams,” which of course implies having a plan in mind. Second, “don’t be afraid” and “don’t back down, just because you feel uncomfortable or out of place or inadequate”—which is how he felt on leaving the comfort zone of his “Podunk” town. And third, “be careful and go slow,” rather than succumbing to pressures to settle into a job or family too quickly.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN A SMALL TOWN
Like this man, most of the residents we talked to in small towns are sufficiently optimistic to believe that a person can do most anything in life, no matter where one has been raised. They believe wholeheartedly that the United States is still a land of opportunity. They do recognize, however, that people are always to some extent products of their environment and that knowledge of the world is shaped by a person’s social context. A young person from a small town may be able to achieve anything that they desire, but may have to overcome barriers that would not have been present in a large metropolitan area. That may be especially true for someone from a small town heading off to college with little knowledge of what to expect.
Few residents of small towns think that poor schools are a significant barrier to making something of themselves. The ones who did generally lived in the smallest towns, usually with a sagging economy and declining population, where classes were small and advanced courses were nonexistent. As one young man from a town like this noted, “I really didn’t have to apply myself that much.” The school, he thought, was good preparation for junior college although not for anything beyond that. But he was not typical. Most small-town residents have heard enough about the problems of inner-city schools to consider themselves fortunate. They often take pride in their local schools, as we have seen, and consider them one of the community’s best assets. Frequently they have good reasons for thinking this way. Despite the town’s meager size, the school may have a decent tax base or receive enough financial support from the state to accomplish its goals. Test scores and graduation rates are likely to be respectable, if not higher than in many urban locales.6
The disadvantages that parents and educators in small towns identify resemble what we considered earlier in discussing the frog-pond effect. A young person may do reasonably well, or even excel at earning good grades or performing in sports or music, and yet feel incapable of succeeding in the wider world. It is all too apparent to this young person that the action is elsewhere. A good student in a high school of two hundred, it seems, would be less competitive in a high school of three thousand, and would be lost at a university of thirty thousand or in a city of three hundred thousand. That might be the self-perception of a reasonably good student. A less talented student could feel even more compromised.
Descriptions of these effects of growing up in a small frog pond vary but usually identify a lack of vision as a central problem. Vision to imagine fruitful opportunities may be lacking because of a realistic understanding of one’s limitations. Family financial resources may be limited. It may be impossible to leave one’s hometown for greener pastures. A restricted vision may also stem from low self-confidence or simply a lack of role models capable of sparking the imagination.
Bill Sykes is the guidance counselor at a high school of two hundred students in a town of just over three thousand. For the past ten years he has been struggling to enlarge the vision of the students he counsels. Although he feels he is making progress, the task remains challenging. The community prospered when lead was discovered in the hills nearby in the 1870s. By 1900, the population soared to more than ten thousand. But over the next half century it declined by 50 percent, and then fell to its present size when the mines closed in the 1970s. All that is left of the mines is extensive pollution that the Environmental Protection Agency is still trying to clean up, not to mention lingering health problems in families suffering from lead poisoning. Less than one adult in ten has graduated from college.
Math and science scores at the high school have improved over the past five years to the point that they now resemble the state average, Mr. Sykes says, and the dropout rate has fallen. But 60 percent of the students are on free and reduced-cost lunch programs, and the school’s per capita expenditures on students is the second lowest in the state. It is difficult to inspire even the best students to believe in themselves. “Probably where we are most restricted here,” he says, is that “we don’t see the opportunities that are available.” If he could say only one thing to the students, it would be simply, “Go out and look.”
The students here have trouble gaining a clearer vision of the opportunities available because of both the poverty they experience and the small frame of reference that their community provides. Poverty has little effect on how well they do in school, but limits their ability to travel and participate in activities outside the community that might widen their horizons. The small town focuses their attention inward to the point that possibilities even at a metropolitan area seventy-five miles away where colleges and employment opportunities are plentiful seem frighteningly out of reach. “No matter how much talent they are gifted with,” Mr. Sykes explains, “their environment may still bring them down because they don’t have a vision of anything better than what they’ve had all their lives.”
He understands the problem from his own experience. Growing up on a farm in a neighboring county, he figured that he would follow in his father’s footsteps and saw little reason to be interested in what he was being taught in high school. His father had not gone to college, so hoped his son would, but encouraged him to major in business as preparation for returning to the farm. Had it not been for an uncle who was a teacher, Mr. Sykes probably would have stayed on the farm instead of becoming an educator.
Yet for most of the students here, the frog pond consists of uncles and aunts, parents, and neighbors who have never been to college. Morale in the community is low. Most of the houses are old, and many are run down. Few of the stores are new. Vacant buildings and aging vehicles line Main Street. “The mentality affects everyone,” Mr. Sykes says. In small ways, it has even influenced his behavior. Citing his yard as a small example, he says he used to take pride in keeping it looking immaculate, but yard maintenance is not much valued in the community. “So my yard is not what it once was,” he remarks.
Still, it is his job to counsel students, so Mr. Sykes does what he can. He tries to emulate the beneficial effects his uncle had on him. Even in a small town, he thinks, role models can be found to give young people a broader vision. Teachers have been away to college and could serve as role models if only the gap between them and the students that typically prevails in the classroom could be overcome. “We try to get our kids involved in extracurricular activities, such as band, athletics, or some kind of club,” Mr. Sykes notes. “That’s where kids see teachers in a different light, not just as an authority figure.” Sometimes relationships develop, he says. Sometimes the kids begin to imagine wider possibilities.
Part of the difficulty that Mr. Sykes has experienced in challenging students to think more broadly is indeed attributable to the poverty in his community. Young people whose families lack the finances to send them to college may, in effect, be saying that there is no reason to dream bigger dreams. That lack of vision is more troubling to educators in more prosperous communities. In those contexts, the problem is more likely to be viewed as one of young people feeling so comfortable with small-town life that they decide on careers they can pursue without ever having to move away. While it might be better for the town’s population if they stayed, educators who see talented students limiting their options worry about the long-term consequences.
Karen McFarland is the high school principal in a prosperous community of about twenty-five hundred that has managed to stay at about that number over the past half century despite a general decline in the local farm population and major expansion in the nearest city, which is an hour away. The high school is only two blocks away from a small liberal arts college that does a reasonably good job of preparing students for careers in teaching and business, and prepares a few for law school and medical school. There are several community colleges within thirty miles and a large university in the city that is fifty miles away. Yet as she counsels the seniors at her school, Mrs. McFarland finds it is difficult to push them to think outside the box. They say, “I could be a city employee or work at the bank, or get a job at the grocery store.” She says, “Sometimes I think that’s all they see. It’s a very restricted vision of the kind of jobs and what life is really like.”
Mrs. McFarland adores her community. “I live here. I love it. I’m not trying to put people down here in the community,” she says. It hurts her to think about the kids who move away and then never come back, but the kids who never think about leaving worry her more. “Don’t be closed minded. Give it a try,” she tells them. “If you think outside the box, then you can never look back and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I would have done this or that.’ Keep your avenues open.” One of her former students, a woman now in her twenties, says much the same thing. She does not regret staying in the community, but she wishes that she had been less plagued by self-doubt.
For students who do go on to college, the other disadvantage of coming from a small town is the one I discussed in chapter 5: college is often a new experience, both socially and intellectually, making it a time of uncertainty and ambivalence. Besides the usual challenges of being away from home for the first time and having to study hard, the small-town background can mean never having had to associate with large numbers of people. The decisions to be made in choosing classes and friends as well as thinking about career possibilities can be unnerving.
Mr. Hennink, the chemist, tells of going to a small college near his home town because it was small and familiar, despite its limited courses and majors, and then trying a large state university for a semester. He felt so out of place that he returned to the small college. His master’s training was frustrating as well. Knowing little about the field or university before he arrived, he was disappointed in the classes that he was required to take. This was part of the ambivalence that prompted his return to the small town.
Mrs. McFarland says that students from her high school sometimes go off to a big university out of state and survive for only a semester. “They feel defeated. They’re not the top dogs like they were in high school. They get lost and they’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, something is wrong, this is not a good fit for me.’ ” She tells them, this is reality. “You’re not the big dog all the time. You’re going to have struggles.” Then she challenges them to be tough. “Prove to yourself that you can have a little hardship and survive. Prove it to yourself. Prove it to your classmates. Prove it to your community.”
REAL REASONS TO ATTEND COLLEGE
If residents of small towns understand that higher education is the key to a more prosperous future, they are not quite that instrumental when they describe its benefits. There is still some of the old sentiment that provided reasons in an earlier era to attend high school. Education was a way to become a better citizen as well as a more knowledgeable person who would remain in the community and work for its benefit. College carries similar connotations, especially now that further training may be required beyond college if a person is to be successful in a profession. The difference is that college is less likely than high school was to be a contribution to the home town. The benefit is more like bread on the waters, effecting good in the wider world wherever a person may eventually live. One of the clearest expressions of this view came from a Vietnamese immigrant who was grateful for the help that he had received as a refugee and felt the importance of giving back. His advice, which both of his daughters have heeded, is to “finish college” and “be more active with the community.” For him, community meant both the town in which he lived, which included a large number of immigrants, and US society more generally.
The shifting nature of these potential civic benefits also suggests that college is understood, perhaps increasingly even in small towns, as a contribution to the person’s individual development. In our interviews, people talked about college as a way for the coming generation to gain maturity, acquire a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence, bide time until they are older and more capable of making good decisions, and simply explore their options. These aspects of personal development seemed to overshadow the idea that college was preparation for a career. “You need a college education,” a parent explained in describing the advice he gives his children. “It may not be so much the things they will learn, but having those four years to mature emotionally and to try out some different things.” Or as another parent observed, “It gives you a time to grow up.” The logic is similar to what columnist David Brooks has termed the odyssey years. Unlike the proverbial farm child, who worked alongside their parents and was a full-fledged adult by age sixteen or seventeen, the contemporary cohort of young people take their twenties—and perhaps their early thirties as well—to tinker with this and that, and discover what it means to be an adult.7
The connection with living in a small town is that residents sometimes felt it was all the more crucial to spend a few more years gaining maturity because the community itself was not a good incubator for adulthood. The town may have been good for small children, yet it was somewhat infantilizing for older ones. The small community was too insular; the church was too chummy. There were no opportunities for the kind of summer programs and internships available to middle-class youths in cities. Compounding the problem, youths raised in small towns lacked self-confidence. If they went away to college, it might take them longer to find their niche.
A school superintendent in a small district of approximately four hundred students said his thirty years of teaching, coaching, and working with teenagers had taught him one thing: be true to yourself. A person who followed that dictum, he said, would have no regrets in life. That was more important than pursuing success in a career. The difficulty in a small town, he had learned, was that teenagers’ usual lack of confidence was more acute when the community in which they had been raised was so isolated and sheltered. He tells them, “Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to experience things just because you may fail. Be true to yourself. Get after it.” He thinks too often young people take the road of least resistance. If they live in a small town, they can be a success in their own little world. But if you “haven’t ever failed,” he says, “you haven’t really done much, quite honestly.”
As if echoing this man’s philosophy, another superintendent said the goal that he tries to achieve working with students in his community of eleven hundred is getting them to challenge themselves with new experiences and ideas. That begins in kindergarten and continues through twelfth grade. For those who continue on to college, the aim that he hopes they keep in mind is experimenting with new things. “Be more willing to try things. Try different things. Give different classes a chance. Try something that you wouldn’t expect you’d be good at, and see how you do.”
Yet another superintendent—a veteran educator in a town of six hundred—cast a similar idea in slightly different language. He says he is definitely a believer in education and thinks a good liberal education is especially critical. But he adds, “I’m not real sure it takes a college education to do what one may want to do. Colleges are on the verge of being even less relevant than high schools in some respects.” Instead of assuming that the purpose of college is to gain technical skills, he believes a person should take a different approach. The purpose of education should be the “broadening of one’s thoughts and mind.” A person should spend the time figuring out what one loves to do and should look closely at all the options.
WHAT TO AIM FOR IN LIFE
As these examples suggest, educators in small towns think a lot about the future that resides in the hearts and minds of the next generation. While it is not surprising that they stress education, it is important to observe closely what they consider to be the aim of education and how that relates to the rest of life. They seldom emphasize purely technical skills or academic achievement for its own sake. Nor do they identify life goals that would sharply distinguish a person living in a small town from anyone else. What they do underscore, though, involves lessons honed from their own experience of living in a small town and interacting with families who do.
Not surprisingly, the small-town ethic of hard work, good planning, and self-sufficiency comes through clearly as an ideal to emulate no matter where a person eventually lives. The disrespect that residents express toward riffraff in their communities is an indication of what they want their offspring to avoid. They can usually point to someone they know who is on welfare or the lazy people they imagine living in urban slums as examples. More often, townspeople point to some of their own mistakes. They say it is fine to have fun in high school or college, but if they had it to do over again, they would work harder and establish clearer long-term goals, and yet try to anticipate being open to change.
The ability to adapt and be flexible enough to change—whether that means a change of careers, a shift in financial circumstances, or the need to move to a new location—is a trait that educators in small towns mention repeatedly. They have seen the value of adaptability as they have moved themselves, and have witnessed fluctuations in local agriculture and business. “Don’t be afraid to change,” the high school principal in a town of five thousand says. “If you get into something and it is not necessarily what makes you happy, you need to go ahead and strike out and try something different.” He says this is especially true given today’s uncertain financial conditions.
Closely related to being flexible is an understanding of the need to constantly ask questions and seek advice. Educators stress this not simply because it is a classroom habit but also to counteract the culture of self-sufficiency they see in small towns. The same high school principal, for example, says his community seems to be composed of “rugged individualists” who are “too proud” to ask questions and try to do everything on their own. “Make sure you get help every step of the way,” he advises. “If you don’t know the answer, make sure you find somebody who does. Ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question.”
Lifelong learning is another emphasis. The idea that a person needs to continue acquiring knowledge and being interested in learning new things after graduation has become clichéd in educational circles, but it is not limited to those venues. The manager of a small manufacturing plant that employs 130 workers in a town of 1,400 was adamant about the need for lifelong learning. He says that even the college graduates who he hires to do engineering and marketing are not trained as well as he would like them to be. “They’ve been given this belief that they have been educated and have an inherent right to an outstanding income,” he complains. “They want to be coddled and feel good all the time.” He thinks this is a problem in cities, too, not just in his small town. To remedy the problem, he tries to train the young people who work at his company that “they have not been educated, and the only solution is to start from day one.” He tells them, “If you’re not getting a half percent better every day, you’re automatically getting a half percent worse.” He has instituted a reading and study program at the company, and requires his employees to participate in it.
This man’s view of the need for lifelong learning was more cynical than most. Others saw it more as a necessity in today’s economy. “What are we looking at now?” a farmer in a town of fewer than a thousand residents asked. “Changing professions seven or eight times in a lifetime.” A young woman who had been reared in his community and now lived in a city said this was true. In her experience—having already pursued three different professions—the key was always to stay flexible and learn enough to “be able to make choices,” rather than getting into a situation where you don’t have choices.
INTERNALIZED SMALL-TOWN VALUES
Being flexible, keeping one’s options open, and continuing to learn and change—these are values that can be embraced anywhere. They suggest, for that matter, that someone growing up in a small town should be prepared to move away. It is as if parents are training their children to leave. Perhaps the security of small-town life is all the more precious for this reason. It cannot last. The community is a good place to raise children, and then they depart.
“The likelihood of my kids moving back here,” a man who has a good job as a bank officer in a town of seventeen hundred says, “is pretty well never.” His oldest son lives in a city two hundred miles away. He loves it there and has only fleeting thoughts of ever returning to the small town. The man admits, too, that the town has been less attractive for his wife than for him. She has a master’s degree in education and would like to be a school principal, but there are no opportunities in town. “It was great here for raising kids,” he says, but otherwise, women in the area face limited career opportunities. Even the social activities available for professional women are sparse unless they happen to love hunting and fishing. “I hate to say it,” he observes, “but this is almost a man’s world out here, and for my wife, she has complained about it for years.”
What parents more often seek to instill in their children are portable small-town values. Rather than encouraging them to spend the rest of their lives in town, they stress ongoing personality traits that reflect the town. Loyalty to the community is exemplified less in expectations about working there for a lifetime than in the ceremonial aspects of community that I have explored in previous chapters. The small-town festival symbolizes community spirit, but can be celebrated once a year and by visitors as well as residents. The school is a source of community loyalty, yet schools are for children who grow up and do other things. Participation in community associations is done as a volunteer and can be continued in other places. The quaint town square can be visited, remembered, and imitated in suburban housing developments.8
The most portable values are aspects of the inner self. These include the values that small-town residents like to imagine are strongest in their communities, but in reality are widely shared in metropolitan areas as well. Hard work, honesty, and personal integrity lead the list. So do the desire for self-sufficiency and need to be neighborly. Religion’s public persona along with the frequency with which conservative moral and political views are expressed may be more distinctive of small towns, although they are by no means absent in other places. Residents worry that even the younger generation in their own small communities may not be as faithful to these values as was true in the past. There is tacit awareness that neighbors can quietly vote Democratic and be welcoming toward gays and lesbians.
Values that are portable are nevertheless inflected with small-town meanings. The idea that a person should be flexible enough to try out new things, overcome a lack of self-confidence, and be willing to fail casts the usual meaning of achievement in a different light. Flexibility does not imply self-interested status attainment measured in career success, and gained by compromising one’s values and manipulating one’s friends. Flexibility is instead an outlook that anticipates failure. It says in effect that bad decisions are expected, and the person who makes them and winds up in a small town is still OK. A person can fail, but still have a positive attitude because of the support that is present in a small community.
Maria Sanchez is a good example of someone who believes in the ability to keep picking oneself up with the help of small-town neighbors and friends. As an immigrant who could not speak English, she struggled in school. Her parents did stoop labor in the fields, working hard to earn a living and find their way through the complicated process of becoming citizens. She recalls coming home from school and crying because of the prejudiced comments of her Anglo classmates. Eventually she made it through college and became a teacher. The advice to the children of immigrants she now works with is to not be afraid. “Grow a thicker skin. Ignore the negative comments. Quit crying. Keep going. Dream. Dream big.” She keeps a file of stories about people who have overcome the obstacles facing them. She tells the tales to her students to counter the negative comments they may hear. It sounds like a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy. But it is deeply communal. Staying optimistic, she says, requires support from one another.9
The meaning of happiness is similarly infused with small-town nuances. Living in a small community out of the limelight is a reminder that happiness does not depend on glamour and success. The frequency with which residents with meager incomes describe their financial situation as comfortable is telling in this regard. When asked about their advice for the coming generation, they seldom highlighted pursuits for the sake of earning more money. As one man observed, “The money aspect is highly overrated.” They emphasize happiness and service more often. People in larger communities do, too. The difference is that in small towns, there is a more explicit denial of the relationship between wealth and happiness. The wealthy are respected to the extent that they mingle with ordinary folks and serve the community. Happiness is said to come in small doses, especially through one’s association with fellow residents in good times and bad.10
CONTINUING COMMUNITY TIES
If residents of small towns implicitly understand the future of their communities to exist in the internalized values that young people carry with them, the ties that remain are not entirely mental and emotional. Tangible connections remain. Even for those who never return as full-time residents, social attachments to the community continue. They are facilitated, as many of the examples I have offered indicate, by temporary returns to work at the family store or live on the family farm, visits to parents and siblings, the need to help aging parents, and the desire for support and advice. The school of hard knocks tethers some to their home communities. Immaturity in facing the wider world along with the normal uncertainties of jobs and marriages send former residents back to their places of origin.
We talked to a school superintendent after he had just given the high school commencement address in his town of three hundred. He has no illusions about the town’s ability to keep its youths. Eighty-five percent of the recent graduating classes have gone on to a four-year college. Most of the remaining 15 percent of the students continue the vocational training they have received in high school at a community college. This superintendent nevertheless believes that many of the graduating seniors will stay connected to the town. He knows this from experience, despite what the students may think when they graduate. In his commencement speech, he advised them to acquire skills to do something they enjoy and save their money. He also advised them, “Don’t forget your roots. As you grow older, those people you can’t wait to get away from—so you can go to the city and be your own man or woman—don’t forget them. Don’t forget your roots, because as you get older, you’re going to need those people more.”
Some of what may draw people back to their roots is the sense of authenticity that I discussed in chapter 3. Not only the residents who remain in small towns but also those who have left or merely visited sometimes entertain the idea that people there are more authentic than people elsewhere. What they mean includes the opportunity that children have in small towns to play, roam freely, and live close to nature. The haystacks in surrounding fields, animals giving birth, family barbeques in the park, and having to deal with everyone in the community are all part of the picture.
The magnetism of this pull toward small-town authenticity was clearly evident in the remarks of a prominent film producer we interviewed who had spent her childhood summers with grandparents and cousins in a small rural community. She tells the students she teaches in New York and Los Angeles about how “incredibly important” it is to get a college education. Yet she adds, “What’s funny is that with all my educational experience, I find myself constantly coming back”—back to the small town where she spent her summers. “That’s where I find my meaning.”
The likelihood that young people who move away will remember their roots is increased by a philosophy we heard on several occasions as “learning from the school of hard knocks.” The idea is similar to the adage that “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” It suggests that parents and educators can teach children only so much. Then children have to grow up and experience setbacks in order to truly understand the realities of life. “I’ve done plenty of dumb things, and they were costly, but you learn by the school of hard knocks” is how one man—a cattleman with a history of failed investments—put it.
One interpretation of the school of hard knocks emphasizes rugged individualism: leave home, strike out on your own, and take your licks. That view was certainly present in small towns. It was part of the notion that people should take responsibility for themselves. It was balanced, though, by the notion that a person experiencing a rough time always has a safety net back home in the town. It means the prodigal child going away, making mistakes, and returning to their parent’s embrace. The cattleman went off to college, discovered he was too young to pick a career, and changed majors seven times. His son no longer lives in the area. The cattleman knows, however, that the small-town values are deeply implanted in his son’s personality. His son comes home for visits and advice. He recently said to his dad, “Man, parents are pretty smart!”
LEAVING THE DOORS OPEN
What does all this suggest about the future of small towns? The parents, educators, and town leaders who live in these communities are not exactly telling the next generation to pick up and leave. The unwritten emphasis on small-town security remains. It is inscribed in the fact that residents turn out faithfully for school plays and athletic events as well as in the camaraderie that manifests itself at the hardware store, if one still exists, or the VFW pancake breakfast. Parents tell their children that this is a good place to grow up, raise children, work hard, and lead a simple life; the young people may not appreciate it now, but will later. The small town is an enclosed space, like a house in which to make a home.
But it is a house that functions best when the doors are left open, not merely unlocked, as residents mention so frequently in signaling the safe neighborliness they feel. Openness suggests more appropriately the opportunity to come and go, to leave and come back. It is the possibility for fresh air and new ideas. The boundaries are permeable. The space is a home, not a fortress.11
“Keep your doors open,” John Laughlin says. He is a businessperson in his early seventies who has lived nearly all his life in a town of six thousand. Life has been good for Mr. Laughlin and his wife, Julia, who is now retired from teaching and still does tutoring on the side. Neither would want to live anywhere else. But as they look back on their lives and think about what it would be like to be young again, they know there are paths they could have taken and did not. Mr. Laughlin earned top grades and was a member of the honor society in college. He could have worked anywhere. Mrs. Laughlin thinks how interesting it would have been to spend a couple years in the Peace Corps.
“Get a little bit uncomfortable,” Mr. Laughlin advises. “There’s a comfort level that you can come back to, but don’t be afraid to get out of that comfort zone and see what the world has to offer.” For him, leaving the doors open means being willing to try new things and take risks, even if that results in failure. Mrs. Laughlin says it means following a person’s basic passions, even if that means putting oneself in scary situations some of the time.
Doors are significant features of life wherever a person lives. They seem to have special meaning in small towns. Perhaps it is because of talking so often about doors that do not have to be locked. Or because doors are the familiar entryways to the homes that provide comfort, the school at which town meetings are held, and the coffee shop where neighbors gather to exchange gossip. Closed doors indicate a space that soon becomes stale. Open doors point to an image of greater freedom.
Small towns have always been communities with open doors, despite prejudices to the contrary that view them only as parochial enclaves. Sometimes the doors are not as open as at other times. Newcomers who squeeze in through half-open portals register the difficulties of truly feeling at home. New immigrants whose presence sometimes arouses xenophobia among established residents feel the difficulties acutely. Yet in reality, small towns were mostly founded by immigrants, welcomed new settlers in hoping of becoming larger towns, sometimes succeeded, and always depended on trade and transportation with other places.
Leaving the doors open is an invitation to vulnerability. Young adults will leave through those doors in hopes that college, service in the military, and jobs in urban places will open other doors. Others will take the opportunity to stay, but travel more often and stay in contact with people elsewhere via electronic communications. Population trends in the nation at large will likely be sufficient to prevent all but the smallest towns from disappearing. Open doors, though, will result in change, just as railroads and highways have in the past. It will be increasingly important for community festivals to be staged and newcomers to be welcomed.