Rage Against the Vegetable Garden:

[ensho]

http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/968


Rage Against the Vegetable Garden: Factory Farming Manifesto Sets Sights on the Edible Schoolyard Program


-snip-

In the current issue of The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan blasts the use of vegetable gardens as a learning tool in public schools as an uppity, vaguely racist tool to subjugate children to manual labor and unfairly deprive them of the Three R's.

Flanagan has a serious bone to pick with California's Edible Schoolyard program, founded by celebrity chef Alice Waters. She insists something about education is polluted when, in math class students learn to measure dimensions by preparing a garden plot. But if the skill set is the same, what's wrong with teaching an illiterate kid how to spell "botany," or teaching chemistry by testing the acidity of local soil? Isn't building a rainwater catchment system -- as an innovative way to teach geography, math and ecology all at once -- an opportunity too good to pass up?

Nope. Flanagan argues it's more important students learn how to write "a coherent paragraph on The Crucible." Part of her resistance comes from her apparent view that scoring high on exit exams is a means to overall educational success, rather than the other way around. I will grant her that: Teaching to the test is harder to do in a garden.

-snip-

Yet Flanagan keeps returning to this notion that the existence of a school vegetable garden makes a mockery of those immigrant workers who slave away in the produce fields of California. She wildly imagines an assimilation novel, The White Man Calls It Romaine, in which the children of illegal immigrants are sent by their teachers back into the fields to do the same manual labor that broke their poor parents.

She omits the part where the children are sprayed with pesticides, forced to work from sun-up to sunset without water and given inadequate protection from the elements. The fact is, these children of immigrants may feel heartened to learn that as a country, the United States is slowly transitioning away from such abusive practices to feed itself (I say "may" because, unlike Flanagan, I don't think assuming I know how a child of an illegal immigrant feels about organic, small-scale farming does anyone any favors). The point here is that there is another way to do things, and that is part of the lesson children should learn.

Flanagan instead insists that "the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life." Our shared cultural life? Does she mean the greasy rectangular pizza? Or the veritable killing fields that represent the way we get our fruit cups into the snack line? The protection of factory farming as "cultural life" is possibly the saddest piece of Flanagan's argument.

-snip-

Maybe it's because I live in the concrete jungle of Chicago, where greenery is tough to come by and food deserts are commonplace. Maybe it's because, as a Midwesterner, I'm overjoyed every time the ground softens up each spring, begging to be planted after months of hibernation.

Whatever the reason behind it, I won't put an end to the expansion of my stunted education in the art of feeding myself and those around me just because some frustrated woman in California thinks I'm a snot-nosed liberal elitist.
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wonder how much the Barons pay Flanagan

Barons hate personal vegetable gardens

[begin_within]

1. Obviously she's never tasted a vine-ripened, homegrown tomato

[asjr]

3. Especially stuffed with Chicken Salad.

[Motown_Johnny]

2. Clearly any basic biology or anything concerning photosynthesis does not belong in school

:sarcasm:

[Mari333]

4. ugh, I detest academic snobbery.

Mark Twain would have torn her a new one.

[depakid]

6. This doesn't even sound intellectual

More like narrow minded and shallow.

[Liberal_in_LA]

9. +1

[surrealAmerican]

5. If the children are in school for more than 20 minutes a day ...

... they ought to be able to learn both gardening AND writing skills. We, as a society, do not benefit from raising a generation that doesn't understand where their food comes from.

[mzteris]

7. there's a new Charter Urban Ag/Community Center School

being set up to open:

It will be a project-based, interdisciplinary school that would operate year-round. Sixth- through eighth-graders — a diverse 120-student population is planned — would learn in multi-age groups through field projects, publications and public-service projects. . . Even school meals would be a learning experience, as students would use urban agriculture practices to grow and prepare food.

This school is going to be built in an economically disadvantaged part of town with large populations of several different minorities. They will have "first dibs" on enrolling as they will be in the "school district" - however, students from all over will be able to apply - and if there are slots available, be accepted regardless of economic need or race or academic "skill".

There are some who "hate" public Charter schools - but the fact is that many (though not all) are extremely innovative and giving students opportunities that they could never reach in a traditional PS system. Well - maybe they *could* - but the red-tape and effort would delay it for decades.

There is a spanish-immersion charter public school that has now - since it has proven very successful and with waiting lists that could never be accommodated - stimulated the local School Board to open Spanish immersion programs themselves. They are planning more and in the process of developing not only the middle school program - generated by the charter student needs - but a highschool program to accommodate those same kids in a few years.

Without the Charter school/parents/teachers/students driving the demand for this - and putting pressure on the school board, proving it's success, and educating the public - the Immersion programs would have been years in the making and instead of having a bilingually-fluent (including reading and writing) group up kids already in fifth grade, they would more than likely still be discussing the "merits" of such a program.


edit: correct grade listed for current students in spanish program

These type of infuences on the local school boards are one of the benefits what Charter schools do. Paving the way for innovation and out-of-the box thinking that traditional public schools are generally prevented from doing.

[onethatcares]

8. what it really boils down to is,

these people are terrified of getting their hands dirty. Of breaking a sweat. Of standing back and admiring what you built, raised, or made with your own two hands. Instead they think the world (their world) should be sanitary, and bland.

And we wonder why kids get asthma and colds so readily. Hell, they don't get out and roll around in the mud anymore. They're expected to sit still and be quiet, perfect little men and women.

That's so wrong.

Peace.

BTW, I can't wait to grow somemore collards and okra this year. My tomatos don't do any good, nor my peppers, but collards and okra, yessir, that's my treat.