No Pain, No Gain
------ Record “Zigen Food Basket Program” of Wangfeng Middle School
There are greengroceries tall up to waist, brassicas big like basins and eye-catching bean-pod when people go to the school’s farm fields. While going to the students’ experimental fields, people can see rich paddy and animated fishes. What a nice picture of harvest it is! This is the “Zigen Food Basket Program”. Those scenes people can see are the results of our teachers and students’ hard working in the fields, based on the financial assistance of the Zigen Fund of China.
“Food is the first necessity of man.” As a rural school, five to six hundred students every day’s three meals problem always annoys us. First, there are no specialized vegetable production fields at local place. Farmers farm food for their own use, almost leave no food for sell. Second, the economic development level in rural is low, each student’s each meal costs only 0.4 RMB, mess hall is not able to purchase food from market. However, students are in their growth and develop period, so the much need of nutrition and low cost of meals are always in the contradiction. So mess hall has to use food easily to reserve, such as potatoes, as the main food, but based on such condition, students cannot get enough nutrition. Third, local people are willing to find job in big cities, left few people farming the land. In this circumstance, few vegetable will be produced. It is obviously that school cannot spend more money to purchase vegetable; instead, school can summon all the teachers and students to farm lands on their own by renting the free fields. Since from November, 2006, school has begun to farm, until 2007, school achieved a great process—almost solving the problem of no reserve in the mess hall, and ameliorating the single menu.
Organizing students to farm cannot only produce enough food for themselves, but also can strength students’ labor awareness and develop their labor skill. With the reformation of Distribution System, the employment rate of rural graduates declines every year. Also more and more parents choose to find jobs in the big cities, so, even children are born in rural, they do not have enough labor skill and practice chance; some even are not able to use the basic tools. “The first time to plough lands”, “the first time to stir excrement” and “the first time to reap millet”, those sentences in students’ essays, are truly indicates the condition.
Rural education should be established in “Benefiting the Rural”. School should give necessary labor practice and provide related skill training while teaching knowledge in the text book. Since the “Food Basket Program”, amounts of teachers and students join in the activities, and with the advertisement and education in the group, students who did not like laboring before are also brought in the program. One who has expert experience teaches the one who cannot farm; as a result, most students master the necessary production knowledge and labor skills. Since students are very interested in their planting and breeding work, they have the rich harvest. They bring their families’ experience to