20 July, 2001

John Sheard examines moves to put rural affairs higher on the school curriculum - but is pessimistic about the chances of success.

THIS may be difficult for most countryfolk to swallow but there are city children in the UK who don't know that milk comes from cows. For them, it comes from a bottle on the doorstep or, more likely these days, in a waxed carton from the supermarket.

Now I would tend to dismiss this as another piece of rural propaganda about ignorant townies but for that fact that I have been told it twice by impeccable sources: the Duke of Westminster, who invites Merseyside school trips to his Eaton Estate near Chester, and again last week by the Country Landowners' Association (CLA).

The reason for this sudden focus on the abysmal lack of understanding of rural life in our towns and cities is, sadly, the foot and mouth epidemic. This has revealed such a depth of ignorance that urban people probably know more about pygmies in the tropical rain forest than life in the British countryside.

The Yorkshire branch of the CLA is now urging the Government to launch a new initiative to include farming and food production as part of the national school curriculum.

Regional Director Dorothy Fairburn says: "We need to see farming placed high on the agenda for essential learning. These children will grow up to have families of their own but at the moment they know very little about agriculture.

"Some have said they think milk comes in bottles from the supermarket, not realising that it comes from a cow which has to be reared, fed, cared for and milked twice a day."

It's not just children who are so ignorant. At the height of foot and mouth, the media was flooded by emails and phone calls of protest from prosperous town-based professionals who made it plain that they looked upon farmers as unskilled country oafs who sat all day on their fat backsides counting their subsidy cheques.

These people, many of whom will have well paid nine-to-five jobs and five weeks paid holiday a year, were sublimely unaware of the fact that the average farmer now earns little more than £5,000 a year, works seven days a week for at least ten hours a day, and never takes a holiday: there's too much to do!

So, quite naturally, I think it is a brilliant idea to have more school teaching on farming, rural life and, above all, food. To state the obvious, we all have to eat yet this vital part of life is simply overlooked - which is why we are now producing a nation of junk-fed youngsters who are showing signs of heart disease in their teens!

But whether we get it is another matter, even from a Government elected four years ago on the slogan Education, Education, Education. Teachers are already under huge pressure to cope with new targets, new exams, and enough red tape to choke a horse.

Next year, the Government will introduce an entirely new subject, civics, to teach youngsters acceptable behaviour patterns that their parents should have started with their mother's milk.

This will take even more time out of an already overcrowded curriculum. The chances of squeezing in farming and food are, approximately, zilch. A nice idea but, I fear, all it will do is give the chattering classes something more to chat about before they move onto the next urban fad.

Does milk come from this …

…or this?

---

Comments

It's not just school children!
Historically, the distrust of the mainstream Trade Union Movement for farmers is due to the perceived lack of support for thier efforts to "bring the country to its knees" in the 60/70s. They could not understand that a farmer could not go on strike!

---