A Study on the Locational Change of the Elementary School in Rural Area

Education is a basic function of human being as labor, allowance, homing, etc. And location of school and its spatial district is very important. Nowadays, in rural area, school is becoming small because of depopulation. On the other dang, it has become easier to go to longer distance school by development of transportation, thereupon small schools are consolidating. Locational change of elementary school and enlargement of school district is much related to the change of spatial structure in rural area. Therefore we need to do areal study emperically about locational change of elementary school and the accommodation and feeling of those students and their parents, so that we can touch various kind of problems in rural area. This study produces as follows I . It is different from case to case with the number or scale of school-closing related to the condition of physical, social, economical, political, etc. IT. Those elementary schools are established sequentially by the form of hierarchical diffusion, and are consolidating reversally to the order of establishment. ill. According to the situation (development or declining) of a region, there are seven types of processing pattern in changing the status of each schooL N. Reduction and locational change of elementary school by consolidation reflect the general pattern of the declining of low level central district and simplification of spatial hierarchy. This study shows five models about the hierarchical changes between each central place. V. It is different from case to case with the accommodation and feeling of those students and their parents to the consolidation. It is related to the condition (facility, location, size, road status, journey time, etc) of the closed school and that area