The trend towards seeing education as a commodity and part of a global industry has transformed the field of education. We argue that these transformations are reducing the autonomy of the field of education as it has incorporated business rhetoric, logic and practice. We examine this through an analysis of discursive formations manifested in two major international edu-business events in Finland – Dare to Learn and XcitED.

Two tendencies in research and policy on youth and education are firstly a general focus on urban contexts and their differences, and secondly a presentation of the non-urban as uniform. Based on a research project on rural young people and their education, we draw attention to these tendencies as problematic, before then discussing some similarities and differences between young people’s lives and education in different rural contexts.