With the educational programme, we want to raise the awareness of children at the most susceptible age to their environment. All this is done by ordinary and specialized methods of education.
They can get to know theoretical knowledge built into the curriculum in the framework of school education. But these “dry” and most of all, felt to be distant facts, data are animated by the young farmers, when they give opportunities to the children to have direct connection with the “curriculum” by walking around their farms. According to our experiences, being near to living animals is not necessarily natural even to rural children. It is sad, but for most of the children, food is “grown” on the shelves of supermarkets, in bags or boxes. Therefore, it really matters that how soon and in what form children are getting to know agriculture. Of course, the goal is not to make a farmer out of every kid participating in the Programme. But we want to achieve to make these children become conscious consumers as adults. The programme was developed by the European Council of Young Farmers – CEJA supported by the European Commission in 2002, with the inclusion of EU15 member states. The backbone of it constitutes six volumes of course books made for 8-12 year old children, an exercise book and a comic book. In this, agriculture's work, role, the activities of farmers are presented to children according to the needs of their age, sector by sector. AGRYA created the Hungarian version of the whole book package in 2006, refreshing the book concerned with EU agricultural policy in 2011, and then reprinted the whole package supported by the European Commission for the students of primary schools working in four different regions of Hungary, one in Balmazújváros, one in Nagyréde, one in Szentes and one in Balatonboglár. It was possible to insert the educational material of TELLUS into the primary school curriculum without any problems. This curriculum was complemented by three-three young farmers per school with practical examples, their personal experiences during a class as an invited guest. Then the children visited the same farmers during a school trip. The Programme started with an introductory-preparatory workshop organised for the teachers interested.
