Chongqing - A primary school in Chongqing Liangjiang New Area conducted a special labor course on harvesting during the International Workers’ Day holiday period.

Tongxin Primary School has a way of instilling in children the spirit of labor by conducting an outdoor farming course. On the rooftop of the school’s teaching building, the school dug up small lm farmland as the experimental field, where kids, with the help of teachers, can witness and join the whole process of crop growth. Last school year, they had already tried sunflowers. This year, the targeting plant was canola.

The late days of April are when canola flowers fade and the seeds grow mature enough. (Photo/Peng Lihua, Liangjiang New Area Media Center)

Students in all grades at school will go to the rooftop and take the canola course in turns. Their goal is to learn from the growing process of canola and to finally gain their own harvest in the form of a bottle of seed oil for each student.

It is not a regular course, technically, but lasts for a rather a long period (from spring to autumn) for them to complete, just as a farmer should take the patience during a season's farming. “It will take nearly half a year from sowing, flowering, harvest, drying, and oil extraction,” introduced Wang Cheng, an English teacher who takes part in the course.

Labor education is a tradition in China. “Labor” in this country’s dictionary is in the top center for its agricultural civilization background and later the socialist respect of the worker. In the school, the labor education often focuses on raising children’s awareness of independence, diligence, and knowing nature, especially for kids who grow up in the cities. Besides, other disciplines’ instructors also seek to expand the kids’ knowledge and cultivate their creativity from this course.

The art teacher brings her class to the harvesting spot, where those young artists are given a perfect place to do nature sketches. (Photo/Peng Lihua, Liangjiang New Area Media Center)

“Apart from the course itself, our school integrates subjects like mathematics, science, and English to this field study, in which the contents of study have gone far beyond the boundary of farming,” said Song Tao, Vice Principal of Tongxin Primary School.