CHANGEABLE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT OF RURAL SCHOOL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The Latvian rural school as educational environment works in the global (world scale) educational environment, where we can observe self-developing processes. The diversity of conditions allows for turning to concrete case studies, where rural school is researched as local educational environment in the evolutionary, structural and functional aspects in the context of contradictions, new tendencies, yet there are unsolved problems and ongoing processes which take place in the global outside educational environment. The investigation of the rural school as local educational environment is important and topical in the aspect of continuous (unceasing) educational environment where there must be succession, systemic approach, fairly equivalent possibilities in the aspect of education accessibility and extraction, offering and quality of education. The results of the research indicate that, in order to provide for sustainable development of schools themselves, rural communities and areas in general, rural schools expand their target audience, formal and informal education and training offers, expand the range of their functions by taking additional functions, thus becoming lifelong learning environment providers for the whole rural community. The results of the research show changes in and diversity of educational environment of rural schools, and it lets at least partially to solve the issue of balanced development in the urban-rural dimension in Latvia. There is great diversity of rural school educational environment.