The chief goal of this article is to identify and interpret the perception of the closure of small village schools by five categories of persons: local authorities, school headmasters and teachers, parents of pupils, pupils themselves, and the remaining village residents. The article relies on the results of a qualitative research based primarily on in-depth interviews conducted in one of the rural communities of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland, one of the Poland's regions). The theoretical framework employed are J. Habermas's (2002) concepts of lifeworld and system. The results showed that each category of persons saw and assessed the local authorities' decision to reorganise the school network in a different way. The most critical about it were the teachers and the most positive were the pupils of the transformed and liquidated schools. The attitudes of the individual categories of respondents are interpreted in terms of how the results of those changes affect their 'lifeworlds', their intermingling, and their relations with "the system".