More than 40 years old "technical school": using a carving knife and an arc to outline the future of grassland children

China News Service, Xing'an League, September 5th. Title: "Technical School" for more than 40 years old: Use a carving knife and an arc to outline the future of grassland children

Author Zhang Wei Chelimuge

Deep in the Horqin grassland of Inner Mongolia, every evening after the start of the autumn semester, the lights in the training workshop of Xing'an Meng Keyou Middle Banner Secondary Vocational School are always on. In one room, the carving knife was running on the cowhide, and the Mongolian leather carving patterns gradually emerged; in the other room, the CNC machine tool splashed with blue arc light, and students gathered around the machine to adjust parameters.

In this long-established vocational school that has been rooted in the grassland for more than 40 years, a carving knife and an arc are allowing children in the grassland to hold cultural heritage with their left hand and weld a hard-core future with their right hand.

Starting from a "factory within a school"

Ten years ago, there were only 356 students in Keyou Zhongqi Secondary Vocational School, and the registration rate for new students was sluggish. “I want to teach students real skills, but there are no decent training venues and equipment.” Principal Zhang Ye recalled that the most difficult thing at that time was not recruiting students, but the lack of hardware conditions.

In 2018, the school took the initiative to build a "factory in school" real-life practice base to achieve the "four-in-one" integration of classrooms and workshops, teachers and masters, students and apprentices, and works and products.

Nowadays, from dozens of workbenches in the national handicraft training workshop to working at the same time to multiple CNC machine tools in the electromechanical workshop, the practical model has covered eight majors, including livestock and poultry production technology and electromechanical technology application.

In the past three years, the number of school graduates entering higher education has increased steadily. Among the 275 graduates in the class of 2026 alone, 254 have been admitted to colleges and universities, and the rest have been directly employed through school-enterprise cooperation channels.

"New business of intangible cultural heritage" under the knife

Entering the ethnic handicraft design and production training workshop, Wuyun Bilig, the representative inheritor of the Intangible Cultural Heritage "Tushi Ye Tupi Painting" at the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, taught the new students how to hold a knife and exert force. The school is not only a Xing'an League-level Tushi industry leather painting inheritance base, but also expanded its professional direction to leather carving, wood carving, Mongolian embroidery and other fields, becoming an important position for the inheritance of Horqin culture.

In 2019, the school innovatively implemented the three-dimensional education model of "classroom + intangible cultural heritage + cultural creativity": consolidating theory in the classroom, bringing in intangible cultural heritage masters to the school to teach their skills, and testing the effectiveness of the cultural and creative market to open up a complete chain of "teaching-learning-doing-creation". In 2026, this model won the first prize for the Vocational Education Teaching Achievement Award in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and was recommended to participate in the national teaching achievement award.

"I started taking orders alone in my second year of high school. I took more than 70 orders a year and earned thousands of yuan in living expenses." Bai Hugejile, a senior high school student, said, "It was the first time I made money through crafts. I was so excited that I called my grandfather. In the future, I hope to use this craft to realize my dream of going to school and make intangible cultural and creative products a hit in the market."

In order to allow students to truly connect with the market, the school has established a market-oriented mechanism for their works: providing free display windows and connecting sales channels. Students' works are jointly evaluated and priced by intangible cultural heritage masters, corporate masters, and professional teachers. All sales revenue goes to the creators themselves. In Zhang Ye's view, this kind of real-life market test not only tempers skills, but also cultivates students' market awareness and entrepreneurial abilities.

This fall, the school will add AI-assisted design courses to related majors to inject new possibilities into traditional patterns. "It used to take four or five days to make a set of complex leather carving patterns by hand, and you would have to redo it if you changed one thing. Now with the help of AI, it can be completed in one or two days." Student Liang Yue said that AI can not only quickly generate multiple sets of plans, but also integrate traditional patterns with modern aesthetics. Bai Hugejile emphasized that AI is just a tool, and the real cultural connotation and manual carving still need to be completed by people. Technology empowers and ingenuity cannot be lost.

"Hard-core craftsmen" in Arclight

In the mechanical and electrical training workshop, the school has built a practical platform close to the real production environment, and students have changed from "listening to theory" to "hands-on".

In recent years, this major has carried out school-enterprise collaborative education with local enterprises, with students' independent innovation as the main body, professional teachers providing theoretical guidance, and enterprise technical personnel providing practical support.

A few years ago, under the guidance of teachers and enterprises, student Bai Liguang completed the innovative design of "a front-mounted lawn mower" and was authorized by the national utility model patent. Now he has been admitted to a higher vocational college for further studies, taking the hard skills he developed in the training room to the next arena.

As an old "technical school" rooted deep in the grassland, the school not only allows students to go out, but also leaves their skills behind. In the past three years, the school has regularly carried out free skills training for farmers and herdsmen. The courses cover modern agriculture and animal husbandry, e-commerce live broadcast, ethnic handicrafts and other categories. It has trained an average of more than 300 people per year, and has served more than 900 grassroots herdsmen in total, continuing to provide practical talents for local characteristic industries.