Perception of school students of Kerala on agriculture and its implications

Abstract

With growing urbanization, better literacy standards and greater skill attainment by rural youth, our younger generation is moving away from agriculture.In India, children get hardly any exposure to agriculture through a curriculum predominated by arts and science.This is all the more pronounced in Kerala, the state with highest degree of urbanization in India. In this background, the present study entitled ‘Perception of school students of Kerala on agriculture and its implications’ was taken up in the Department of Agricultural Extension, college of Horticulture, Vellanikkara, during 2013-15 to assess the awareness level and perception of today’s children on agriculture. Survey was conducted among higher secondary school students of Alappuzha and Thrissur districts of Kerala. From each district, one urban school each with CBSE and state syllabus and one rural school each with CBSE and state syllabus were selected. Thus a total of eight schools were selected, and from these schools, the entire students of one division, randomly selected, formed the respondents. Hence, three hundred and ninety three students were surveyed. In addition, a total of sixty four teachers from all these schools were randomly surveyed as it is important to know their awareness on agriculture and perception about agriculture as an occupation for prospective youth. The results revealed that there exists huge variation in the awareness level of students from rural to urban background and also between respondents from state and CBSE syllabus. The ANOVA analysis done proved that the highest level of awareness on agriculture, was exhibited by the students from rural state syllabus school of Alappuzha District closely followed by the students from rural state syllabus school of Thrissur district. The lowest awareness level was recorded for students from urban CBSE schools of Thrissur and Alappuzha districts with a mean value of awareness as 0.449 and 0.470 respectively. The results of Kruskal Wallis test showed that there exists statistically significant difference in awareness level among teachers from different schools, with teachers from rural state syllabus schools having the highest awareness with a mean value of 50.53 and from the urban CBSE schools having low awareness with a mean value of 20.34. On analysing the perception of students on agriculture, the salient features that came up include, close to 36 percent of the sampled respondents have a negative perception that farming occupation is meant for the less privileged in the society, and 44 per cent of the student’s felt it as better for educated youth to engage in industrial/service sector than earning a living through agriculture. Nearly 48 per cent of the students think about agriculture as a good occupation only for the rural youth. The analysis of perception of teachers revealed that though all of them believe that it is necessary for our youth to explore the immense opportunities offered by our agribusiness sector, close to 86 per cent of them consider agribusiness enterprises as highly risk oriented having unpredictable prospects. About 84 per cent of the teachers included in this study felt it as necessary to incorporate the agri based experiential learning module into the school curriculum. The simple correlation analysis between the independent variables included in the study ( namelygender, background, nature of landed property, crops grown, type of dwelling, rural contact, purpose of contact, familiarity with farming, participation in extracurricular activities, garden in home and income from agriculture)with the dependent variables awareness and perception separately revealed that there exist strong, positive or negative correlation between them. With a view to assess the relationship between the dependent set of variables with the independent set of variables, a canonical correlation analysis was done. The canonical correlation analysis yielded a canonical R value (Rc=0.691) and squared correlation value R²C= 0.477 and the same were found to be highly significant as revealed by Chi square value of 271.35 (p <.001). To find out the contributory factors affecting the dependent variables awareness and perception, a stepwise regression analysis of the two dependent variables on the vector of independent variables was conducted separately. The analysis revealed that background, garden in home, participation in extracurricular activities, familiarity with farming and income from agriculture were the key factors affecting awareness whereas background, income from agriculture, participation in extracurricular activities and gender were found to bethe key explanatory factors affecting perception of students. A principal component analysis was conducted to assess how the eight schools surveyed could be clustered based on the independent variables included in the study.The analysis yielded a correlation matrix wherein the rural schools of the two districts were found to be significantly correlated with each other. High correlation existed between the urban schools too.The component plot in rotated space clearly depicted the close relationship between the two sets of schools- rural and urban, irrespective of their syllabus, and indicated the existence of a rural-urban divide with regard to the awareness and perception on agriculture.