A Child's Garden ...

American schools have found some pretty stupid ways to waste student's time. In some of our local high schools, for example, if you have a talent for football you can spend 25% of your academic time "studying" it. My fellow local citizens seem mostly content with a system that has brought in several State football championships.

I've long been a critic of American education's tendency to be a fashion industry, with mostly bad consequences for students, so I should be a receptive audience for Caitlin Flanagan's Atlantic Monthly diatribe against school gardens. They are, it seems, an insidious anti-academic plot to prepare our children only for careers as lettuce choppers. In California now - and coming to a school near you soon - she claims, school gardens have become the focus of the curriculum, displacing algebra and The Crucible. I've seen sillier things - at least you probably won't get a concussion gardening - but I find Flanagan a bit hard to take.

First there is the feverish tone:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

This may call up images of Mao marching hapless students out to the harvest, but the school gardens I have seen are typically about the same size as a suburban vegetable garden. Divide that by a few hundred or thousand students and each student winds up responsible for a couple of flower pots worth of garden. Is the garden curriculum dominating the school? Maybe, but Flanagan's story lacks the telling detail and specificity that would convince me that she has actually seen one of these in use.

Flanagan's writing style - call it Mo Dowd light - is heavy on the cranky sneer, light on relevant facts, and suffused with vaguely anti-feminist hostility. Here she is on Alice Waters, founding mother of the school garden movement:

Waters, described by her biographer, Thomas McNamee, as “arguably the most famous restaurateur in the United States,” is, of course, the founder of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, “yes we can,” ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.

Now California public schools do indeed suck, but there a lot of other plausible candidates for reasons, starting with a vastly needy student population, heavy on non native speakers of English and decades of declining budgets driven by old Proposition 13. Unmentioned by Flanagan is the continuing mischief wrought by No Child Left Behind, which has turned schools nationally onto almost total focus on tests.

On the few occasions where she mentions actual evidence it's hardly germane. Her extensive perusal of the literature on school gardening has not revealed that it improved algebra scores. Imagine that. One charter school with a committment to rigorous standards puts up much better scores than a long time garden school.

Her writing is perfect fodder for that sort of conservative who sees every idea, good or bad, as a liberal plot. Unsurprisingly, Steve Landsburg thought the article was great. Four years ago, Ann Hulbert offered a more dyspeptic take on Flanagan and her works.