Education for all as a global agenda has particular repercussions for those living in
rural poverty. By adopting a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interview data
collected from fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in 10 rural Punjabi
households, we expose the intersections of education, gender, poverty and
rurality. The concept of a rural family habitus focuses attention on the collective,
relational and dispositional worlds of such families. Three dimensions are used
to analyse reproduction and transformation in each narrative set:
intergenerational educational dynamics; on-going gender dynamics; and, social
dynamics within the rural field. The findings challenge the stereotyping and
assumed homogeneity of rural families whose gender cultures and positive
educational dispositions are diverse and complex. The gendered histories of
parental education, their aspirations, and their social status in the rural field
intersect with the changing gender relations which result from schooling, and the
increasing differentiation between educated and uneducated rural families.