The School Garden flap …
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 …
2 thoughts on “The School Garden flap …”
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.
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