The rapid and substantial urbanization in China has led to an increasing urban-rural divide in almost all aspects of institutional life, as well as aggregating environmental degradation. There is an urgent need for educators, scholars and policy makers and practitioners to study China's countryside, particularly through examination of the impact of urbanization and development on its people, society and nation. Offering a locally grounded and multidisciplinary analysis of the changing ecology of rural schooling, this book studies the role education plays in the transformation of rural society and bridges "the gap between narrowly defined ethnographies of schooling and broader anthropological studies of socio-cultural processes" (Kipnis, 2001b, 474).