Only three students enrolled in the agriculture track of the „Kuzman Shapkarev“ secondary school in Bitola for the coming school year - too few to form a class. Farmland, a farming tradition, and yet no one wants to study agriculture. How did we get here?

Education Minister Vesna Janevska promised the track won't be scrapped but integrated into a Regional Center for Vocational Education, with existing students from the second to fourth year continuing. But she immediately shifted the responsibility onto the school - saying the management and teachers „didn't undertake enough activity“ to promote the track among ninth-graders.

It's easy to pin the blame on teachers who weren't proactive. But three students isn't the result of one year of poor promotion - it's the result of decades in which agriculture in this country turned into a trade with no future, without subsidies that arrive on time, without buy-back schemes that guarantee earnings. What child would choose a profession the whole state treats as second-rate?

For comparison, this year around 14,500 students enrolled in secondary schools in the first enrollment round. Three of them chose to work the land in a country that lives on imported food. This isn't the problem of one school in Bitola - it's a mirror of what happened to an entire profession while the institutions looked the other way.