I look back at it pretty fondly. School in the country was basically all of the people from the town meeting up every day to joke around and learn stuff.
We had excellent facilities, it always felt safe, and after school we roamed the town and bits of nature on our bicycles. I had like 6 tree houses I could visit, jump around tall hay bail forts, we even once dug a bunker on someones paddock next to the cemetery. The beach was no more than four streets away no matter where you were in the town, and you always had friends and family around the corner.
I am glad I left at 17, because once you have gone through school ambition takes you out into the greater world to explore. But I would never want to have grown up in the city.
Most of the benefits of the city are really only enjoyed once you are an adult anyway.
Perhaps rural towns are different now, I haven't been back since I left.
I went to a rural high school from 2008-2012. It was hideously underfunded, and if it wasn't for enormous effort from underpaid, overworked teachers putting their sweat, blood, and heart into everything they did, nobody would have learned anything. The school struggled to heat the building in the winter, which seems okay except this far north, "winter" is really 90% of the school year. If you were even slightly different from the "norm" normal school days were hell. Out of 150 students who entered my year as freshman, 95 walked during graduation.
The fact that there are so few people means it's incredibly hard to share interests, and because you live in a rural shithole, the only interests people have are: drinking, drugs, driving around in the mud, and making fun of "different" people.
While I appreciate "small towns" allow you to "know everybody", that has it's own downside in the complete inability to have any privacy. I also hate thinking about all the possible opportunities I missed from growing up in a poor rural environment.
I live in the city but grew up in the country too (minus the beach, although I have lived near once), I would definitely want that for my kids, the city isn't kid friendly.
The problem is, as an adult, you don't want to leave the city with all it's cultural charms.
I came to say something similar. I can even expand this - it isn't so bad being a straight white girl either. The main thing is that you need to be a pretty average person. Most small towns this basically says you are white, straight, fairly traditionally minded and christian.
Being an outcast in a high school with a population of less than 400 isn't easy because most folks know everyone else.
