While in some ways I hate to give Caitlin Flanagan any more web traffic for her flameball of an article about school gardens, the response has been very heartening. Here’s a link roundup:
- Red Herrings Are Not Dinner Food, or why Caitlin Flanagan is WRONG about school gardens | Oakland Local
- Mag writer: Alice Waters and school gardens are evil
- An Edible Schoolyard in Durham: How Kids Grow (Video)
- Samuel Fromartz: Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan Blames Arugula for California’s Failing Schools
- Chef Kurt Michael Friese’s response was probably my favorite, in part because I find the contempt for manual labor among the upper classes both incomprehensible and odious.
- And even this morning’s New York Times Food section had a piece on a school in Greenpoint that is poised to build the first edible schoolyard in the New York area.
As someone who comes from a long line of experiential educators, as well as someone who watched a number of very very smart family members struggle with dyslexia (and thrive when given something concrete to do), I think anything that gets kids connecting what they’re learning in the classroom to applications in the real world is a great thing …
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The sad part about Flanagan’s article is how little she trusts the teachers. Of course if teachers haul kids outside to pull weeds for 1 1/2 hours/week, instead of having them practice reading, then that’s a problem. But if the teachers use the garden as a learning tool, well, where’s the problem? Having a school garden is comparable to going on a field trip, except you don’t need to pay for buses. And you can go more than once a year.
Isn’t this a classic complaint of students, particularly in math class: “How are we going to use this in real life?” Seems to me school gardens bypass this complaint, teaching content in context.