Rural school offers students chance to live their dreams

"We’re a rural school so students should learn farming," said the high school’s vice principal, Chen Suzhen. "Our fields are training bases. We’ve learned modern techniques."

Students study the cultivation of local crops such as oranges and passion fruit and produce rice noodles and dried tofu — locally processed foodstuffs.

They grow the produce that is served in the canteen, with the surplus sold on by teachers and the profits helping in part to fund the school.

Passion fruit that sells for 30 yuan per kilogram is grown in a half-hectare greenhouse, while elsewhere on site biomed majors tend a 2-hectare herb field and students also pitch in at the 6.7-hectare orange orchard and pig farm that hosts 3,800 trees and 250 animals.

There were more of both last year. Financial woes forced the sale of 550 pigs and citrus greening disease meant many orange trees had to be chopped down. The surviving trees have fewer blossoms than usual this year.

The orchard serves as a practice base for students, and a demonstration zone to test new varieties and teach local farmers better cultivation techniques.

Tangelos from nearby Fujian province were recently introduced here.

"Previously, only elderly residents stayed in Huichang. Younger people migrated," said Zeng, the vice principal.

"That’s partly because local enterprises weren’t efficient. But that was, in turn, because of poor human resources."

The school hopes to break this cycle, because "graduates need work, and industry needs workers," Zeng said. "We need to link business to vocational schools."

Increased cooperation with local businesses in the food and service industries is one approach the school is taking to achieve this aim, another is applying to offer e-commerce as a major, as the sector is flourishing in the county.

Most of the school’s oranges were sold online last year. It also sells passion fruit on peer-to-peer platforms.

But some students’ dreams are even more ambitious, such as ninth-grader Liu Qi who wants to teach English.

"English is useful," she said, speaking the language proficiently.

Her classmate, Xiao Quanzhou, wants to work with math.

"I want to go to university in Nanchang, where my brother studies," he said.

And 18-year-old vocational student Liu Juan, whose parents produce oranges, hopes to go to work in information technology in Guangdong province’s Shenzhen.

"It’s very developed, so it offers more opportunities to develop myself," Liu said.

"Then I can return and enjoy a career in Huichang."