This chapter examines discourses on the rural world and rural schooling in teachers’ journals and related literature in interwar Austria. These writings, authored by teachers or former teachers who later worked in various positions within school administration rather than belonging to the milieu of “typical” intellectuals, mirrored broader intellectual debates and revealed how such ideas were translated into educational thinking. Their core assumption was that schooling should simultaneously preserve traditional lifestyles and time-honoured values within an idyllic rural universe and overcome rural “backwardness.” Rural culture was generally valued, while modernization was often framed as a threat—one to be managed through education that would reinforce traditional culture and moral values. At the same time, authors deplored poor hygienic standards and unhealthy living conditions in rural areas, and they claimed that mental backwardness hindered peasants from adopting modern agricultural techniques and increasing production. Similarly, peasant virtues were praised as a resource for the nation, while rural populations were also portrayed as distant from the state, unable to grasp the “bigger picture,” and unwilling to subordinate local interests to the national good. In this context, appropriate schooling was expected both to safeguard cherished traditions and to address perceived deficits. Education was thus imagined as directing modernization in a selective manner—promoting elements deemed desirable while preserving others thought to be under threat. The chapter conceptualizes this approach as selective modernization, drawing on and revising the concept of regressive modernization.