The crisis of rural life in Russia involves a declining and aging population, emigration of rural young people to urban areas, lack of employment, and farms in urgent need of modernization. Programs in rural schools can be used more deliberately to encourage young people to remain in the village and to equip them to be agents of rural modernization. One of the most important tasks of social institutions now involves that of orienting young citizens toward the prospect of taking active part in the renewal of life in their hometown community, of finding self-realization under rural conditions. It is in this connection that the most important social and pedagogical task of education (preschool, school, supplementary, or professional education) is defined in the countryside: that of shaping children's value attitudes toward the rural way of life. It is important for rural school graduates to have a precise idea about their role and place in the rural community, for them to take on and strongly affirm the traditions based on the values of the rural way of life, to acquire the knowledge necessary for life in an agrosociety, and to become the inheritors who carry on the historical memory of preceding generations.