What is taught in agricultural school.
According to the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), today 14.3 thousand children attend agricultural schools. 66 educational institutions have their own farmland, 73 have agricultural machinery, and 64 have greenhouses. 77 schools have animals, horses, rabbits, deer, chickens. Crop and vegetable growing, agronomy and agriculture are included in the curriculum. In recent years, school beekeeping, the collection of medicinal plants, agro-tourism, and information technology in agriculture and forestry have begun to develop.
Initially, agricultural schools were supposed to help preserve traditional agriculture in Yakutia, ensure the diversified development of students and prepare them for an active independent life in the countryside. Graduates receive not only a certificate of matriculation, but also a labor specialty. 54 Yakut agricultural schools have a license for vocational training, 58 cooperate with institutions of secondary vocational education. So, in the first Yakutian agricultural school Dirinskaya, children are trained in nine professions, including a driver and tractor driver, a carpenter, a seamstress, a cattle breeder and a computer operator.
The Magaras school in Gorny ulus became agricultural in 2005. However, back in the 1990s, it took part in the republican experiment “Education by work in a rural school”. Then the projects “Fish”, “Roe Deer”, “Medicinal Plants” were implemented, and it was they who became the basis of the future agricultural school – one of the best in the republic, included in the list of the 100 best schools in Russia in 2015.
– We have a large educational and subsidiary farm: one and a half hectares of garden and 92 hay, a greenhouse with an area of 110 square meters. We keep 18 cattle and 28 horses, – says the director of the school Maxim Maximov.
169 local children do practical work at the school farm and horse breeding base, and engage in crop production. Do they have time for general education subjects? Over the past ten years, the school has produced 17 medalists. According to Maxim Maksimov, every year 50-70 percent of graduates go to universities, 30-40 – to colleges. Every fifth choose an agricultural educational institution.
– I am proud that our agricultural school is one of the best in the republic, – says Lena Nogovitsyna, a student of the 11th grade. – We all love to take care of calves, feed cows and horses, we are happy to study the topic “Tractor Science” and soon we will receive tractor driver certificates.
Lena also participates in many ulus, republican and All-Russian scientific and practical conferences and is very grateful to the teachers for the knowledge gained.
Let’s calculate the income.
In Yakutian agricultural schools, children are not only engaged in rural labor, but also taught to profit from this activity, to correctly calculate expenses and income. More than half of the agricultural schools have income from the sale of products, services and business activities, and a third have business incubators.
At the Keptinsky school, the business incubator has on its balance sheet a machine for making popcorn, cotton candy and potato chips. In the Tattinsky district, for five years, agricultural schools have supplied their potatoes, cabbage, beets, carrots to other educational organizations of the ulus within the framework of municipal work.
At the Atamay Agricultural School, all the students got involved in business projects. Elementary classes grow vegetable seedlings and houseplants for sale, high school students grow flowers and vegetables.
Infographic “RG” / Rafael Zaripov
– Each class has its own business project: someone makes souvenirs and amulets, covers for documents. Others plant carnations before May 9, collect medicinal herbs. In our training workshop the production of sewing, carpentry, pottery is organized, – they said in the Atamay agricultural school.
In Yakut agricultural schools, children are taught not only peasant labor. Here they do not forget about scientific work. Six projects are being implemented at the Keptinsky School that should change the attitude of children to rural life. They have been exploring small reservoirs for more than ten years. Schoolchildren study the local ecosystem, the impact of forest fires on it.
– Our agricultural school is the only one in the village, which is located in a remote and difficult-to-reach place, where there are no development centers for children, music and sports schools, where there is a weak Internet connection, off-road. It would seem that there are no conditions for the development of gifted children. Teachers had to find new educational technologies in agricultural education to interest children, – says Ekaterina Dokhunaeva, a teacher of Russian language and literature.
Additional payments and grants
Increasing coefficients are used in the financing of agricultural schools. But not all receive them, but about half of the institutions based on the qualification. When compiling it, educational activities, the quality of education and upbringing, staffing, the organization of labor education and productive activities, the level of material and technical base are taken into account, which, by the way, can be very tall
The Magaras school, for example, won the republican competition of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in 2013 and won the MTZ-80 tractor, and a year later became the winner of the regional review competition and received a tractor. simulator.
In 2020, the Atamay school received two million scholarships for the project “Saydyy Agricultural Scientific and Educational Laboratory”. A hydroponic system for growing plants was installed at the educational institution. Land reclamation work in the hay fields of the school, the construction of a horse farm and an increase in the number of horses, the construction of a modern year-round intelligent greenhouse are planned with a teaching laboratory, and these are the plans for an ordinary school in the village from Byas-Kyuel, where, by the way, less than a thousand people live.
