School children need to work fields to raise money for their school.

Am I reading this right?

It's that "dystopian challenges repackaged as feel good media puff pieces" thing.

> Each day the students swap their uniforms for work shirts and boots and spend part of their school day outside tending to the 85-hectare crop.

That is not how you grow wheat.

Yes, and that's what makes it oniony

Oh I'm not questioning your post here.

Sounds like another one of those "dystopia disguised as feel-good" stories.

For what it’s worth, THIS is a model for how schools should build curriculum. Any school with resources to produce food or fibre should follow suit.

I think I'm gonna create a sub for these ^ ^

What sounds better: r/dystopianFeelGood or r/FeelGoodDystopia ?

The children should work instead of learning?

You grow up working on a farm and you quickly learn you better keep your grades up so you can have a different life then that.

Children should have practical skills incorporated into their curriculum. Whether it be farming, DIY, cooking or balancing the checkbook. The schools are letting everyone down by not teaching usable, practical skills especially letting kids down by not showing them why certain book work is necessary irl.

It is if you’re too cheap to install irrigation.

It takes some pretty good grades to be successful at farming today.

r/orphancrushingmachine

Are you implying they learned nothing?

Posters here didn't grow up rural, and it shows. Many HS local to me have farming/ranching, and even basic forestry classes. Those professions are the lifeblood of the local communities.

Those students weren't just working a field, they were learning about calculating land expectation value, current industry practices and potential future ones, marketing, growth and yield equations, etc. The smartest kids probably use it as a springboard into other Ag fields, ranging from law to research.

It does. Virginia Tech, where I got my Forestry degree, offers a whole range of Ag degrees. Then there are also people who go into Ag related law, research, economics, buisness. Farmers can be the nicest people in the world, but the buisness is cutthroat, and the dumb do not survive.

Farmer here, irrigation is actually expensive to not only install but to run, just imagine the water bill. We just slap our wheat seed into the ground with some pot ash and rely on Mother Nature to provide rain. At most, the kids may be pulling weeds but if you plant your wheat seeds close they can usually over take the weeds.

Classic America for you.

Correction: these professions are the lifeblood of our entire society.

This is Australia though

…Neo-Australia for you.

I'm not an expert or anything but free irrigation for farmers seems like the kinda thing that we should be prioritizing. Edit: Really like getting downvoted for literally saying I don't understand something but it sounds important

r/aboringdystopia exists

Eh, it's not really necessary, we've compared our rain water crops with irrigation and when it came down to it, the net income we were both making was about the same at the end of the day.

People forget because of industrialization but yeah.

And before industrialization? You needed 8 to 9 people working the fields for each person that didn't. It's why cities were so small.

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Oh ok, like I said I'm not an expert just seemed like the kinda thing that'd help

ITT: a lot of people who didn't read the article.

The land was empty and donated for this purpose, the school previously had to stay inside due to dust storms, they are using the money to send the students on trips. From the description it sounds like they spend most of the time just looking at the wheat when outside.

Also there's only 7 students at the entire school. This is RURAL rural. From kindergarten to year six - for them this is probably closer to glorified recess. Kids this age, anything not sitting at a desk is fun as hell.

Had a nature garden at my elementary school growing up, and I would have loved to spend a half hour in there every day messing around with the pond, composting, picking weeds and planting plants, etc. But nooooo, we would get to go out there maybe five times a year. My mother works at the school now, and I went to see her recently and they ripped out the entire nature center and replaced it with some grass and concrete.

I went to a rural school and we had a bumper ag program and a crop field for both education and funds. Sadly, ag and sports is all they care about. They stripped the tech programs until they didn't exist and haven't increased teacher salaries in many years. Their math and (non ag related) science classes were always understaffed and funded. Now, they are being hit with a wave of teachers quitting because they only cared about sports and ag programs. It's a damn shame because I love agriculture but the old guard that rules the school board are stuck in the past.

The phrase "work instead of learning" would be laughable if it weren't so depressing. Hands-on experience is incredibly valuable.

Irrigation is super expensive and it doesn't help for most cultures, cotton for example is a high value crop that would get no extra production from irrigation. Irrigation is mostly used for wet crops, like rice or beans or on a smaller scale for quick or delicate crops like strawberries and lettuce

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No it isn't, there are not enough wheat growing jobs. Family owned farms almost never work either, because they get bought out and out competed by conglomerates.

What are you even getting at?

While learning incredibly valuable life lessons and experiences.

Learning is work, and working is often the best way to learn. The only real question is whether the curriculum is designed to encourage learning effectively.

God knows there's plenty of work-that-doesn't-encourage-learning-effectively in your average school where you don't get to spend time with plans.

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All good. My old mentor used to say "don't worry when they steal your ideas, worry when they don't want to."