“Team for education and culture” TOK from Belgrade, Serbia has an interesting project with the aim to show to the next generations that living in the rural areas is something very positive and special. The project consists of educating the youngest ones to appreciate farming and farmers, and know where our food is coming from.
Life in the city Vs Life in the Countryside
Life in the city is organized in such a manner that the schoolchildren spend most of their day in enclosed areas. The exposure of the children to a natural environment and the establishing and nourishing of a close connection to nature is lessened by today’s technological development and fun trends (personal computers, television, mobile phones, children workshops, and shopping centers), the organization of a teaching process in classrooms, extracurricular activities in enclosed areas and the time spent in transportation from one activity to another.
Life in the countryside is to a certain extent passing on differently than life in the city boundaries. Every day jobs are directly connected to field works, animal breeding and maintaining the household. Children are contributing to the maintenance and development of the family from the earliest childhood by fulfilling various duties. Peculiarity of growing up in the country is in learning through actual work and cooperation with other members of the family which allows the skills, knowledge and experiences to be taught and learnt in a spontaneous and immediate manner. This way, children spend most of the day in a relaxed and unconstrained exploration of the world of animals and plants and in play with their peers in an open space.
Towards the food growing path
The project "Life in the Countryside“ is an activity that makes part of the yearly program of the elementary school Starina Novak from Belgrade, which enables the pupils to experience a day of the countryside life. The agricultural household that is widely opening its doors to the children from the capital it´s called Markovic, from the village Banicina in central Serbia. Thanks to it, the pupils have the opportunity to try themselves in various tasks (gardening, cooking and preparing of firewood, animal breeding related jobs, working in woods and fields) escorted by a host and a teacher. Apart from the everyday jobs, the pupils get acquainted with the local tradition and beliefs of the countryside population and, of course, with the manner in which their peers spend their free-time in the country.
Staying in the countryside enables the children from the city to spend a day in the nature intensively. Being in contact with a different lifestyle brings encouragement for revealing various interests which couldn’t have been aroused by the familiar conditions of the city. This is the opportunity to contrast personal everyday experiences and to compare life in the city to life in the countryside, seeing the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of both.
Staying in the countryside benefits the acquisition of diverse experiences and helps creating a broader picture of the world in which children develop, make choices and bring decisions about their own paths in life, possibly the path of food growing in the countryside.
Post written by Milo Dilki? and Ivana Radi?.
Picture credit: Birds in a tree, by Mckenna71.