[...] 13, 2010 by Seonaid Sierra on Strollerderby asked us what we thought about Caitlin Flanagan’s article on School Gardens [...]

[...] School Gardens Bad For Kids:Few things warm the cockles of my crunchy, alternative-education loving heart like the site of a thriving school garden carefully tended by the local elementary kids. This month’s Atlantic Monthly features a scathing take-down of this charming trend. Caitlin Flanagan takes on the school garden movement for, as she sees it, robbing children of valuable instructional time and replacing those hours with menial labor. [...]

Honestly? I think that gardening in scools is a wonderful idea. And its not exactly menial labour. Its 100% a learning environment! A science teacher could bring their class out and show how plants grow, digging up seedlings to show the students the stages of life that a plant goes through as it grows. A health teacher can show the students how food gets onto their dinner plates and incorporate it into helping kids kids make healthy food choices.
While I understand the argument of immigrent parents not wanting their kids instructional time wasted on menial labour I think that Ms. Flanigan does not understand the whole idea behind the gardens. They are learning environments, with which teachers can use lesson plans built around biology, health, chemistry and even math in a tangible understandable way. When used in correlation with regular textbook learning kids are way more likely to remember those lessons. I know I did.

As with anything in education, it’s what you do with it. If all that is being done is marching kids out to drop some seeds and pull some weeds, then it isn’t good for anyone. But if it is being combined with math, science, health, even art lessons then all, even poor immigrant children, will benefit.
Finally, so many immigrants came to this country with the idea that the past must burned away. Families abandoned traditions, languages, and, at times, the knowledge of the means by which they supported themselves back home. So much was lost. What proof is there that these children of immigrants are being taught how to raise food and use that food in their daily lives?
I’ve yet to read an article about all the time kids in America are spending in their gardens instead of vegging in front of the TV.

I love the idea of having kids garden. I remember my mother teaching me how to plant tomato and squash seeds in a planter my dad made from some recycled wood, watching the seeds sprout, tending to the plants, and waiting impatiently until the day we could pick and eat our vegetables. However, I can understand where the author is coming from. About 70% of the kids at my neighborhood elementary school are children of new immigrants; many of their parents are migrant or day workers. I see the school garden whenever I drive by, but the last assessment of the school showed that 75% of the students tested below proficiency levels in math and 70% below proficiency levels in English and science despite being better funded per student than some of the schools in wealthier neighborhoods nearby. (Thank goodness for private donations and grants) Learning about where your food comes from is great. But these kids don’t have parents who speak the language well. Many parents don’t have high school degrees and can’t help their kids with their English or math homework at night. The students desperately need extra help and time learning basic math, English and computer skills. I can’t speak for every parent at that school, but those I know want a better life for their kids and know that they need a solid education in order to have it. I am sure if I were to ask them to choose a one day a week tutoring session in math/English versus a one day a week gardening session outdoors, they would all choose the class time. Just another perspective.

Newby, I get where you’re coming from, but do you really think that an elementary school kid who has poor reading comprehension, can’t put together a grammatically correct sentence, or know how to multiply and divide is going to learn it by going out into a field and planting a crop? It’s very difficult, if not impossible to develop a gardening curriculum that will teach these things in an effective and time conscious manner.

I think the question of whether gardening is an effective teaching modality is a reasonable one (I agree with the poster who said: depends on how it’s done!). Where Flanagan’s argument is a non-starter for me is the way she assumes that the migrant laborer stooping to pick a lettuce and the elementary school kid stooping to pick a lettuce are doing the same thing. They aren’t, not in any kind of meaningful way. At the end of the day, the schoolkid is going to get to eat that lettuce. His dad the migrant laborer isn’t. There are many other differences (what happens if you get injured, for example, as a laborer with no insurance or as a schoolkid, or even the nature of the farming practices themselves, I suspect) but for me that’s a really big one.

Newby, are you thinking of the op-ed article by Susan Engel?
‘In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read.’
Susan Engel was primarily talking about education at the elementary school level. The Edible Garden project that Caitlin Flanagan writes about, from what I understand, is aimed at middle-school students. While the idea of getting dirty and making learning real appeals to me, I don’t think Flanagan’s article reads like the rantings of a flaming wingnut. She makes a number of valid points in the dialogue about education reform including the argument that ‘with the Edible Schoolyard, and the thousands of similar programs, the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time began in the Progressive Era, and it has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be.’

I wouldn’t be opposed to using gardening to enhance learning at schools that are already doing a decent job. But I’ve seen too many schools that aren’t educating their kids well who want to add this gimick or that program and the results are rarely positive. Essentially, if your school is doing a bad job teaching kids in the classroom, I doubt they’ll do it any better in the garden.

Hrm. I’m in favor of school gardens, because I feel that our lifestyle in 21st century North America is almost completely divorced from reality. I actually AM a curriculum developer, with a silly looking stack of degrees that include science and education. Given my close association with the farming community in my province, I find her dismissal of all agriculture as menial labor, frankly, offensive. I think that the assumption that, somehow, we can improve the lot of the underclass by simply lifting some members of it up into the middle class ignores most of the critiques of our class structure that have been produced in the last 90 years…

and yet. I *can* see that there are unexamined class and race issues being swept under the rug by the local food movement, that the needs of the middle and upper-middle class to reconnect with the truth of where their food comes from may not be appropriate goals for a classroom full of students who are likely to work summers in the field.

I think, though, that the unquestioning race away from having to do anything to do with dirt and farming presupposes that the industrial food system, replete with migrant labor and all its attendant abuses is the only way of the future. I am concerned that doing away with school gardens, or only providing this learning to the middle class is a good way to make sure that only the middle class gets the necessary skills to own and RUN the farms of the future.

There’s something in the original article that doesn’t ring true… something about the way that, on the one hand, she scoffs at the ‘volunteerism’ of white-middle-class women of a certain age, and, on the other hand, mentions what she has observed volunteering at the food bank. I know that my own food security is improved by what I grow in my back yard, and I think that the women of insecure incomes that I was recently teaching to cook would be well-served by releasing the sense that needing to grow your own food is degrading. What I have seen is people who are willing to go hungry rather than work the soil. This is a sign of a deep problem in our society as a whole, not simply in the women who hold this belief.