On the outside Looking in

North, discusses and illustrates stress and frustration among rural adolescents. The article is based on tapes of classroom discussion and written work produced while the author was a teacher. We live in the fourth most densely populated country in the world. For the most part we are town dwellers, thinking urban thoughts, experiencing urban feelings, constructing urban plans for the future. We need more houses, hospitals, schools, factories, theatres: we'll build them in the large centres of population, where they're most needed. The 'country' is agriculture and scenery; the first we have to subsidize, the second we treat as some static witness of the Grand Purpose. Only when we are hit by extremes of winter weather or by disaster are we reminded that large numbers of people are geographically and socially isolated from the country's mainstream: it took the broadcasters almost a whole day to establish themselves in Aberfan. In fact, about one in five live outside the towns; about one in ten in small and socially isolated communities. Our urban stereotypes of the countryman remain fixed, unfed by direct experience for decades: slow-witted but cunning, strong but cumbersome, unhur-ried in his ways, old fashioned in habits and speech, given to timeless ruminations on the meaning of life, conservative, pennypinching, rather laughable. Of his strengths we can discern only his Wordsworthian closeness to Nature and the eternal verities attaching thereto; rude good health that enables him to work long hours in all weathers and live to be a hundred; and a decided way with animals. The fixity of the urban stereotype increases the social isolation of the communities it seeks to describe and is unaffected by the new media of communication (particularly film and TV, but also the popular press and radio) precisely because they project urban images based on urban concepts and stemming from urban preoccupations. Older country people find this a thoroughly familiar situation: they are used to being ignored, sentimentalized or misunderstood. For the young, however, the problem is acute. They have to cope not only with distortions of ways of life they have not fully assimilated themselves, but also with the very powerful tugs of urban 'pop' culture? 6 Photo: J.