Target School Gardens, Get Tomatoes in the Face

I wrote yesterday about Caitlin Flanagan's excoriation of school gardens in the Atlantic, accusing her of being just as hysterical about grinding her axe as she thinks the rest of us are about our wholesome food ideology.

What is the rest of the blogosphere saying? Not surprisingly, most bloggers who have responded see Flanagan's ideas approximately the same way she sees school gardens: as offensive roadblocks to rational discourse and progress.

Kurt Michael Friese, founder of Slow Food Iowa, gets to the heart of the matter by demanding to know how sticking kids' noses in books will possibly benefit them or our society more than instituting hands-on learning. "The belief that we will create better citizens by teaching to the test (an idea she advocates for repeatedly and vociferously) is one that will lead to a generation of closed-minded automatons incapable of learning, thinking, or fending for themselves," he writes on Civil Eats.

Samuel Fromartz at the Huffington Post calls Flanagan's piece a "hatchet job" whose tortured logic is set on bearing out a dubious presupposed conclusion. "Did she go to the school, talk to the kids or parents or teachers, ask if any kids felt they were being exploited, or even wasting time — in a school garden?" he asks.

Emily Bazelon, writing on the XXfactor blog at DoubleX, is the only one I've read so far who acknowledges that Flanagan might have a point, though she is quick to point out that the article doesn't actually support that point with any facts. "Caitlin Flanagan may be right that Alice Waters' school garden movement in California is an undeserving fad," she writes. "But I don't see the evidence in her Atlantic essay, acerbic whirl of a read that it is, as usual."

Then Tom Philpott at Grist pulls out the big guns. He skillfully unearths the kernel of cultural trouble at the center of Flanagan's argument:

the idea that farming and cooking — and even getting one’s hands dirty in the garden — are beneath respectable middle-class aspiration is deeply problematic. Such thinking reinforces an unjust food system that exploits cheap labor as a matter of course, propped up by a largely invisible army of migrant workers who do the dirty work of tending fields, slaughterhouses, and kitchens.

Wow, a simple schoolyard garden sure can dredge up a lot of complex ideas.

Flanagan's point seems that be that whether we like it or not, succeeding at standardized tests is what gets you ahead in this country, so doing anything but "teaching to the test" puts disadvantaged students at further disadvantage. What she refuses to acknowledge is that there is a wider context to consider, or that programs such as arts and gardening initiatives, if employed well, can make test material come alive for students in a way that words on a page never can.

She refuses to see that side of things because she is so set on grinding her axe. As Rebecca Marx at the Village Voice Food Blog puts it, the article is a “round of Alice Waters target practice." If only she had better aim we might be able to get a real, honest-to-goodness debate going.

Photo: woodleywonderworks via flickr