ABSTRACT
Focusing on rural-urban differences in educational attainment and dropout rates, this chapter outlines how spatial differences in education can be understood through insights from critical realism. Instead of over-emphasizing the individual as the primary analytic entity, as is often done in education research, the chapter takes into account the actor-structure interplay in order to understand individual action.
Interview data is presented, documenting how young students in rural areas experience other forms of challenges when it comes to education than their urban counterparts. In order to explain why this is so, the primary analytical focus of the chapter is at the structural level, and it shows that how the education system is set up in terms of governance, organization and funding, makes space relevant for the outcomes produced.
The chapter puts forward a number of generative mechanisms at the domain of the real, historically and spatially situated and conditioned, as causal agents of early school leaving. Space and context work as constraining or enabling factors for the generative mechanisms at play, and the chapter argues that generative mechanisms create spatially specific opportunity structures and educational landscapes or educational spaces that produce spatial differences in educational trajectories and outcomes.
