Are School Gardens Ruining Our Kids?

Caitlin Flanagan, writing in the Atlantic about how school gardens are set to be the downfall of a generation of schoolkids, might be able to convince you she has a point. She starts by reminding readers that for centuries book learning has been the hatch by which plebeians escaped the hard slog in the field to reach for a better life.

Our schools, by extension, are supposed to provide the book learning necessary for children to rise above lives of tough manual labor. Such as lives spent working in fields and gardens.

If gardening programs, as she puts it, "hijack the curricula," students won't learn what they need to learn to pass standardized tests that will help get them into college and out of an existence defined by fields and factories. When a lot of our schools are failing a lot of our kids, do they really have time to think about vegetables?

This "giant experiment" of having our kids tend gardens is, Flanagan believes, the product of a "new Food Hysteria," which "has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life." Woah. This is where you might wake up from the reverie produced by her flowing prose and realize that she has an axe to grind.

She's no longer talking about whether poor kids can get a good education, but railing against a healthy national dialogue about health and sustainability. If she had it her way, we'd all shut up and turn back to our TVs.

So do we have a food hysteria? Well, the reason we are in a position in which we feel we need to teach our kids a thing or two about food is because we have turned the other way and allowed our food system to become dysfunctional.

The details of how and why we're teaching gardening do indeed deserve careful attention and discussion, but to say that it is hysterical to want to impart to our children — or, heaven forbid, discuss — one of the most basic elements of our life is hysterical in its own right.

Photo credit: Samuel Mann