This paper is a slightly revised version of a formal lecture given on July 29, 2004, to the second cohort of ACCLAIM doctoral students on the final night of a course titled "Rural Education: Historical Perspective." This essay shares the following ten precepts of rural education, which are principles intended as teachings: (1) Rural areas and cities "have made one another"; (2) There "never was" a golden age of rural virtue; (3) All human sins operate in and on the country ("rural is not an idyll"); (4) "Rural" circumstance is a setting of meanings more than it is a set of characteristics; (5) Rural meanings are founded on a "sense of place"; (6) The spread of The World City and of its meanings "obliterates places"; (7) The World City is founded on "placeless" ("globalization"); (8) The "national economy" has become the economy of The World City; (9) "Cosmopolitan meanings" increasingly determine the character of schooling in rural places; and (10) Rural people must struggle "to imagine and articulate" decent futures in which community and place figure prominently. (Contains 7 endnotes. For Occasional Paper No. 12, see ED485731.)