Michael Corbett's writing on the irony of schooling in rural places inspires the author to reconsider how place shapes his commitments and his learning as a White, educated class, land- and place-attached American male. In a time of climate change, economic collapse, and other related cultural and ecological crises, people's assumptions about education and schooling need to be profoundly reexamined. In "Learning to Leave" and in "Rural Schooling in Mobile Modernity: Returning to the Places I've Been," Corbett evokes the failures and inadequacies of contemporary schooling in rural places, developing a deep analysis of the relationship between schooling and the larger disembedding culture of global capitalism in which rural people and places are exploited and undervalued. Such an analysis could be extended beyond the rural scene to also include the institutionalization of education as schooling most anywhere. The irony of schooling everywhere is that it provides a questionable education for everyone; everywhere schooling functions as an engine of questionable progress. In this article, the author pulls back from a critical view of schooling and its everyday problems to consider the larger historical and geographical contexts in which culture and education take place. The author argues that all the places that impact people's lives, and that people impact through their living whether they leave, stay, or simply visit with their dollars, have a cultural history worth knowing about--and not only because knowledge of place might improve one's chances for "school success." (Contains 3 footnotes.)