In Indonesia, education issues continue dynamically increasing following the movement of social, economic, political and cultural changes which forms a new identity that leads the rural community needs educational development. The problem of education in this research focuses on disadvantaged areas in Indonesia, especially in Jeneponto Regency, one of the underdeveloped regencies in Indonesia, which categorized as the lowest human achievement index in South Sulawesi. It also becomes the only one of disadvantaged regencies from 24 regencies in this province in 2017, this based on the data of the central statistical agency, Indonesia which focuses on measuring success in building the quality of human life. Based on this case, through ethnographic approach, I conducted a research on one of the villages in the Jeneponto Regency, namely Pappalluang Village, which is located 70 km from downtown Jeneponto in the mountainous border of three regencies namely Jeneponto, Gowa, and Takalar regency and it is famous as the furthest and most underdeveloped area in Jeneponto. Based on these accounts, this paper investigates by focusing on exploring dipper from the basis of understanding the education paradigm by looking at the perception of people in a rural community in Jeneponto on how they view education and how important is to the community.

This study found that the main point on how they interpreted education as an essential thing is that education is for their children's best future life in getting decent jobs because they argued that even as an agricultural region with the majority as farmers, they consider that the work of farmers is menial and puts them in a low social status. I found the ambiguity of the meaning of education by the people of Pappalluang. On the one hand, they consider education to be important. On the other hand, the efforts they have made to support their children's education have not been fully implemented. They only allow being involved in formal education and providing school equipment such as uniforms and stationery, but not by supporting other important things, such as the development of children's potential which these are only given by the teachers in schools due to the fact that parents mostly spend time in rice fields or gardens starting in the morning until the sun sets. There is no deep interaction between parents and children where this is important in developing children's potential.