Caitlin Flanagan is such a smashingly good writer that I normally devour anything she’s written. But when I saw her latest piece in the Atlantic—roughly 5000 words in opposition to public school gardens, where students learn horticulture instead of long division—it seemed well, too petty a subject for Flanagan’s vast talents—so I put it aside without reading it.
Today I read it. Wow, was I wrong. This is Caitlin Flanagan at her blistering best. I’ll offer you a few choice quotes, but my real recommendation is to leave now and go read the entire piece.
With the Edible Schoolyard..the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time…has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and the another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outercourse” and in another it’s abstinence-only education.
Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it?…If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: A way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
Until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise we become complicit—through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, undereducated underclass, but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its state.
There’s much more where that came from. Why are you still here?
This story has a very close analogy in my life: my father worked as a welder on a GM assembly line, in the days when GM still had plants in the northeast. He made sure I got a good public-school education, but I had a head for numbers, so math and science curricula tailored to make people “proficient” were too repetitive to hold my attention.
Hands-on class projects, though, piqued my interest in science and engineering. Being able to imagine, design, and build stuff made a huge difference in my education. Yes, I spent some time welding (and I have the novice-welder’s scars on my hands to prove it), but without that education, it’s unlikely I would have become an engineer, and there’s no doubt in my mind that that welding experience makes me better at my job today. I don’t know about people outside the engineering field, but most of my engineering colleagues have a similar story of how non-book learning allowed them to discover their talent and passion.
School gardens are probably just the fad of the moment, but Ms. Flanigan’s alternative proposal, spending more time with “important” books, misses an important point: the purpose of public education isn’t merely to make as many students as possible “proficient” in as many subjects as possible, but to cultivate the talent of the younger generation. If the public school system graduated 100% of its students, but none of its graduates were fit to do anything but answer phones and push papers, we would be significantly worse off than we are today.
“but Ms. Flanigan’s alternative proposal, spending more time with “important” books, misses an important point: the purpose of public education isn’t merely to make as many students as possible “proficient” in as many subjects as possible, but to cultivate the talent of the younger generation. If the public school system graduated 100% of its students, but none of its graduates were fit to do anything but answer phones and push papers, we would be significantly worse off than we are today.”
I think that’s why she repeatedly listed “higher math” as her preferred alternative, throughout the article.
I agree that policies in education should be evidence backed and politically neutral. For example, choice of “organic” is a value judgement, and does not equate with “better”. Lets strip out these woolly values from our education. It is also ridiculous if the garden becomes “the center of everything”. However, the piece seems to be biased. It was reported that the grades went up – surely a good thing? No, this was dismissed, without evidence, as a lowering of standards. Since the school has a garden, it must have lower standards?
The author seems to think that education will be improved by more intensive classroom learning. I think (although I am not an educationalist) that this will not work unless the students are engaged. If the garden gets them engaged, and it seems to do so at least in some cases, then all to the good. It is not very effective to suggest that the semi literate 14 year old who hates school requires intensive, focused attention when that is simply not available. The piece mixes up basic literacy with getting to college – these are two very different and both laudable aims. It is just as possible to focus on basic literacy through menus and recipes as it is through “The Crucible”, probably more so. Once these basic skills are acquired, there is no need to drop literature just because the school has a garden. It is absurd for the headteacher to aspire to get a kid to college if he can’t read a bean tin label.
Again, I am not an expert, but it is possible that educational theory may have moved on a bit since 1984.
So lets get the gardens in perspective – a useful tool to assist with the principle objectives of the schools – teaching the curriculum.
I think there are probably diminishing returns to something like this; spending a unit in a biology class in a live garden might be valuable, but devoting a couple years’ of a curriculum to it really isn’t. (On the other hand, I remember most of elementary school as a waste of time, anyway, and playing in the mud might not have been much worse.)
I grew up in Iowa, and, while I never lived on a farm or had a school garden, I find that I take for granted the knowledge of things that a lot of city people seem not to know. (“What do you mean you never heard of crop rotation?”) Several years ago, in DC, preparing to help out at a high school science competition by playing the role of a high school science in a run-through, I correctly guessed the order of the gestation lengths of four animals, after which I commented to a fellow volunteer who went to the same high school as I did, “I got that entirely from having grown up in Iowa.” (As long as I’ve lived in New York City, it still seems a bit odd to watch football games without seed corn commercials in the breaks.)
Where the school garden concept will be most practical is near farmland, where it is least useful; if we could put a farm field next to an urban school, I can imagine the students learning something they wouldn’t otherwise pick up. Subsidizing seed corn commercials might be more cost effective.
I’m afraid this article is fighting the wrong battle.
I certainly agree that experential education has the risk of being hijacked by a social agenda. However, I strongly disagree that this type of classroom activity is inherently bad. Any honest person who wants to improve education–the kind that matters: math, science, language–should be looking at outcomes and should be rather agnostic about methods. I think there is good evidence that this type of engaged learning works.
Of course, if we did away with the public education monopoly in this country, we would see better outcomes–perhaps with classroom gardens, perhaps not–and we would eliminate the social indoctrination we are really opposed to.
I think Flanagan has a point, but she dilutes it by working in plugs for her own preferred “advanced” studies, which are often just as useless as gardening when it comes to lifting students out of poverty.
She quotes the teacher whose goal it is to help students “read Shakespeare and laugh in all the right places”. That’s fine if you enjoy Shakespeare, but hardly a stepping stone to a better life. (The teacher says it’s necessary to get his students into college. Actually, you don’t really have to be a Shakespeare fan to get into college, even a good one. But even if that were true, that would just beg the question: How does it help students for colleges to require that?)
And higher math is useful in some jobs, but not in others. If you’re headed down the engineering route, certainly schools should provide you with a good calculus curriculum. But there are lots of students who are clearly not headed for engineering careers (at least, I hope not!), but who have skills they are cultivating in other productive fields that they enjoy, and taking up their time with calculus is actively holding them back. No, it is not making them “well-rounded”. Mostly it just makes them hate school.
By all means, we shouldn’t waste student’s time on gardening until they’ve learned how to read and communicate clearly, and to do basic math. But we shouldn’t waste their time on Shakespeare or calculus either. I’m helping some students with calculus classes who are still struggling with English. If you plan to live in this country, there are almost no circumstances under which it’s better to spend your time learning calculus than learning to speak English.
I found this article very powerful despite my initial expectations and first scanning.
I fully agree with most of her points about the politicization of education, by both left and right, and the opportunity costs it represents.
But I have several reservations that most of us might agree on:
First, part of the essential purpose of education, especially public education, is to expose children to the larger world and socialize them in a way that enhances their ability to “succeed” in the real world (or at least the somewhat real-er world) of adulthood.
Second, a central purpose of education (and an important return to public investment in schools) is to prepare children to be “good citizens” by educating them about western history, its shifting values and value conflicts, and the purpose and history of our political institutions, all of which they will inherit and pass on to their children or not.
Third, a crucial skill set often overlooked in school curriculum is students’ need for some basic education in personal finance and (here I’m playing to the crowd) economics.
Finally, if you’ve ever been around a group of primary school kids, you know you got to get them outside for awhile to keep your sanity and let them blow off steam if any more educating is going to happen that day. As a means of accomplishing this, if that’s how school garden are actually used, they don’t offend me the way other examples (like teaching creation science) do.
I am always mystified by call for “more instruction” for reading, writing and arithmetic. American school routinely come out on the bottom by most measures when compared to other first world nations. Yet, somehow we manage to have a higher standard of living and are generally happier than those same nations. I think this is primarily due to our culture of self-reliance and our free wheeling approach to enterprise and business.
The call for more education and more dollars seems to me to be rooted in the teachers’ union call for more money, but without any real accountability. If we really care about our kids education, showing them how to grow their own food might actually be a good idea. As you noted in your book, you’re glad you had a quality english professor to teach you Shakespeare, but really that’s just recreation activity and a waste of college credits. This is true of most subjects taught, even algebra and trigonometry. After all, most of the adults I know (besides all the professional mathematicians I work with) have no use for what a polynomial, a limit or a ring is, but many of them make more than I do.
Past teaching kids the basics of reading and all that, I think public education is a waste. Past elementary school, if further education is desired by parents for their kids let them pay for it. Of course this reduction in public “services” should be accompanied by a reduction in taxes and public expenditures.
Ken Said-“we … have a higher standard of living and are … happier than those same nations. … primarily due to our culture of self-reliance and our free wheeling approach to enterprise and business.”
I would say this is a case of identifying the effect and then inventing the cause that sounds the awesomest. We have a higher standard of living than most nations because we had a long history of geographic isolation from foreign competition. We are a huge country rich in resource allocation. From our countries very beginning, we had a free-trade-agreement across an area larger than Europe and our primary competition (European countries) have just now gotten arround to accomplishing that. And my personal favorite; we have a higher standard of living because our national literacy rate is near the top of the world, thanks in no small part to public education.
Thomas Friedman, in “the world is flat” quoted Bill Gates’ response to American students having an edge because other countries focus on reading and writing and math but neglect the more creative studies that American students have access to. Gates said (paraphrasing)”The best idea for a new software, or a new anything is not going to happen when the worker does not know his times-tables”
I had a visceral revulsion to the description of these farm schools. They misappropriate the most valuable and most scarce resource a student has. Time.
Ken said “we are generally happier” than other countries, but USA is not in the top 20 countries ranked by happiness http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061113093726.htm
and the literacy rate was ranked at 27th out of 205
http://www.caliteracy.org/rates/
The USA does badly in these rankings considering it is definately the richest in the world. All that wealth does not translater directly into happiness.
I can’t get too worked up about this as long as it remains a local silliness. Let people vote with their feet as to whether they want their kids educated this way. Federal program–no way.
Neil, when you promise a kid that they will be getting a useful education and instead of learning how to write a resume and calculate interest on a CD, all they have to do is successfully plant some peas, you are cheating kids. And you are cheating me of a (at least semi-) literate employee, which drives up the cost of labor for everyone.
Halold- “All that wealth does not translate into happiness”, no. but but more wealth translates into happiness than does an equal sum of poverty. And as my good friend Daniel Tosh would point out, “money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy a wave0runner. And it’s pretty hard to frown while riding a wave runner”
More to the point, an advocacy website with no sources listed is worse than wikipedia as a source. wikipedia at least cites the recent UN Development Program report which shows the USA occupying the 8th rank globally in literacy. With a literacy rate of 99%. Most of the nations with a better rank had populations the size of New Hampshire. The USA turns out more literate workers than any other nation in the world. I agree, it’s a pretty low bar to set. China has more honor-students, than the USA has students. But in terms of generating productivity, having a CNC operator that can read his own operating instructions goes a long way.
Benkyou,
To make a free society work, you need to delegate responsibility to the appropriate authority. In my opinion, the best authority for kids’ education is the parents of the kids, who have the greatest interest in the outcome. If they choose public schooling, they have ample avenues to express their wishes–PTA, school board and local elections, and failing all else voting with their feet. As long as these sorts of decisions are made locally, I can live with stuff like this. In a diverse society with liberty, perhaps it is to be expected. What remedies do you propose?
Neil- Would you favor removing all processing and quality standards on meat or baby formula or cancer medicine?, so long as a credible report for each piece of meat went with it documenting its risks? In a simplified model, where such a report could be counted on, I would. But there is no way to accomplish such a thing in practice.
I don’t think any educational program should be implemented until significant research by independent sources document its efficacy. Maybe if a parent reading a report that says this new magnet school has a 10% literacy success rate and a 5% matriculation rate still wants his kid to go, I in principle, would support his right. If independent analysis shows the school to have a higher success rate than other options then I would support it without reserve.
But at the same time I would equate it to a parent, knowing full well the likely results, feeding her newborn sugar water instead of formula of milk.
Benkyou,
With respect to market goods, I stake my personal safety on the desire of companies to make a profit through good reputation (and to avoid expensive law suits), rather than government regulation. However, as a practical matter, I would not strongly object to the Federal government setting de minimis standards, with local governments allowed to set more stringent standards.
I suppose consistency requires that I also accept a Federal role in setting de minimis standards for local education. Maybe, but first I would prefer to see local governments implement a voucher system to allow greater competition in providing education. It would be interesting to see whether the sorts of social engineering experiments described in this article could exist with a voucher system.
Neil- My guess is that this farm school is a charter school, the very sort of thing that is supposed to be competing with public schools.
In a case of perfect competition, producers would be competing for sales, but too often it is consumers competing for scarce product. Finding a place to live in NYC for example. Or finding a decent school at all in rural America. Not enough people to fund the public system can mean not enough potential customers to warrant an entry into the market by a private offering.
I don’t even want the government setting minimum standards, I just want a full and independent accounting of the efficacy of any educational program (public or private) be conducted before it can be offered. I think the stakes are higher when risking a bad education even compared to an NYC Hotdog Cart.
Re web site statistics. The sites I quoted were not intended to be a definative version, just to illustrate the error of statements like “we are generally happier” than similar countries. Happiness is not easy to measure, so there will always be much room for error. But to assume “we are happier because we are richer” is lazy and evidence suggests it is wrong. Greater wealth is not translating into greater literacy, or the USA would be No.1.
The article and comments bemoan the lack of research to back the gardens, and then go on to assume, with no evidence, that the outcomes are worse than without gardens.
“Neil, when you promise a kid that they will be getting a useful education and instead of learning how to write a resume and calculate interest on a CD, all they have to do is successfully plant some peas” But the artcicle clearly stated that the kids are taught to write, using the garden as a subject, and possibly inspiration. It also said the grades went up – this is the only evidence we have on this school, and it shows that the programme
is working in this case. Now, the evidence is not all that strong, as we don’t know enough about how it was collected, but it is all we have, and there is no reason to assume that the exact opposite of the evidence is correct. Nowhere does it say that the only requirement is to succesfully plant some peas.
” I just want a full and independent accounting of the efficacy of any educational program (public or private) be conducted before it can be offered” Does that include the current one? That means no teaching until the studies have compared all possible methods and programs. We have to accept that education will be evolving, and programs will be tried at a local level, and if succesful will be taken up more widely. It is this point that the studies should be done – if the Government is to support a program, then it should have some evidence it works. It can also find out which aspects are useful. I suspect in the garden case, a garden is a good asset and useful educational tool if used wisely. I suspect there are aspects of the way this particular version of school gardens is implimented that are not useful, and smack of ideology. So lets get the evidence, take to good bits and get rid of the bad.
Harold- “That means no teaching until the studies have compared all possible methods and programs.”
What I had suggested does not mean this at all. Traditional education has a proven track record of efficacy. When the Edible Schoolyard’s efficacy has been proven by an objective review to be as good, or even nearly as good (not a high bar to set) then it can be offered. In the mean time it should remain an experiment.
What you are suggesting is akin to saying that if we require testing of any new heart attack medicine that no heart medicine can be prescribed.
You said- “Greater wealth is not translating into greater literacy, or the USA would be No.1.”
The USA is currently in the 13th rank of the UN Education Index worldwide. None of the more educated nations have a significantly lower GDP/capita
And, “But the artcicle clearly stated that the kids are taught to write, using the garden as a subject, and possibly inspiration”? This is highschool and they’re making it sound like leading horses with handfuls of sugar cubes.
All I’m saying is that if the evidence is not that strong, as you point out, then don’t risk a kids future on it.
Benkyou Burito – yes, you are quite correct about the no teaching until all methods are tried – the current one does have a track record, so can provide a benchmark to assess future modifications.
To be a bit nit-picking on the wealth / literacy, I haven’t got the 2009 data, but in 2008 there was a significant difference between Slovenias $25K per capita, South Korea $16k Cuba at $5k and the USA’s $46k. These may not now be above the US, but I bet they are pretty close with much lower resources. But again, point taken that the top countries tend to have pretty high GDP / capita.
When I said the evidence was not that strong, I meant the evidence we have from the article. I do not know how strong the evidence for or against gardens is. What I was pointing out is that assumptions were made that the standards were lower, when the only evidence we have is that standards got higher.
I agree entirely that this sort of program should not be rolled out without study to asses thier value. Nor should they be dismissed as useless because they don’t fit in with some pre-conceived ideas about classroom learning.
Harold- “there was a significant difference between Slovenias $25K per capita, South Korea $16k Cuba at $5k and the USA’s $46k”
Leaving cuba aside for just a moment. We have S.Korea with about a third the GDP/capita (by your numbers) and Slovenia at half. I would call this a difference in “Significant” as defined by the two of us. My idea of a significant wealth difference is one that affects the quality of life. And maybe GDP is not the best indicator.
I don’ know anything personally about Slovenia, but I spent some time in S. Korea. Unemployment is very low. Most people consider themselves middle class. the OECD factbook has S. Korea rated at (or near) the highest in access to the internet. And average wages (by industry) are not significantly less (factory worker wages are about 85% of average USA factory worker wages) than in the States. Their business culture spreads the GDP much wider across the population than that of the USA. And Education is a paragon virtue. S. Korea is not a poor country.
I can’t accept criticism based on Cuba stats. The reporting agencies play down their GDP to show the awefull effects of the embargo, and play up their educational accomplishments to show the world how a workers paradise can exists. I won’t say that they aren’t poor or that they don’t have good schools (they have a great corps of doctors) but the lack of transparency makes it suspect.
I wrote about this article for Strollerderby today, here: http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2010/02/09/school-gardens-bad-for-kids/
The comments on the Strollerderby piece are a fascinating look at how parents of school age kids are reacting to Ms. Flanigan’s ideas.
As you might suppose, I’m a fan of school gardening projects and many other alterntive teaching methods that get kids out of their classrooms and into experiential learning.
I do see Flanigan’s point though: growing up I was in absolutely no danger of not mastering basic academic skills. But I was in serious danger of spending so much time with my nose in a book that I never learned any practical skills.
Those are some great comments. A nice balance between the “Practical Modern Mom” crowd, skeptical-yet-open minded, and lunatic fringe from both sides of the debate.
I think the major dissonance comes from understanding what the program really is.
Many who support it think it is a school that uses a garden to illustrate academic lessons taught in a classroom. The Edible Schoolyard does not put academic learning first.
For other supporters, this is fine too. They see planting a garden and cooking its yield as effective ways to teach academic lessons. You can learn fractions and basic math skills by cooking and planting a garden.
But ESY is a Middle School program. Fractions, times-tables, the basics of physics and biology are all things that are taught in elementary school. Education is supposed to get progressively more challenging, not less. As one commenter suggested “a teacher can dig up a seedling to show the stages of a plants growth”(paraphrased but fair), yes, that’s what they do in 2nd grade. In Middle School they should be quantifying genetic deviance and citing Mendel.
Another supportive element suggests that not all students learn the same way, so programs like this are needed. That would be fair if the students learned the SAME material in a DIFFERENT way. But it’s not fair to teach them LESS material or SIMPLER material because they have a problem learning in a traditional manner.
Others suggest that it does kids good to learn the roots of this country or to get out and get some fresh air. That’s fine, but school is supposed to prepare children for adulthood and the agrarian job sector has been absorbed by about 100 superfarms and these kids have a better chance of landing a NBA contract.
Still others oppose the focus on academics as a whole. And yes you can make good money as a plumber (my brother does) without an education. Lots of drop-outs get a GED and a phlebotomy certificate and do just fine. So teach them plumbing and bloodwork if you’ve given up on them becoming doctors and lawyers.
So for the earth-lovers (I’m quite fond of my home planet) like Sierra I have to suggest this. The kind of real work that is going to save the planet is going to be done by scientists, programmers, inventors, politicians, lawyers, doctors, educators, and even entertainers. Why would you support your kids being pulled off of that track?