Seldom have I seen an education piece in a national magazine spark such outrage. “Wrongheaded, belligerent, and fueled by animus” fumes one blogger. “Snob-bashing populism,” cries another. And here’s a third, “baffled by the utter stupidity of this snotty Atlantic article.” No, this is not a reference to the latest bit of Teach For America puffery in the Atlantic, but Caitlin Flanagan’s article “Cultivating Failure” in the same issue, which dares to suggest Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard movement is “robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math.”
Flanagan’s piece is a good old-fashioned takedown, and she opens with an imagined scene of a poor Mexican man, who makes a dangerous and illegal journey to Berkeley, California in the hope of getting his children a great education, only to find his son is picking lettuce at middle school. “The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology” driven by Waters, whose goal, Flangan writes, is to turn children into “eco-gastronomes”:
Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.
Flanagan’s article is a good read, by turns informative and deliciously bitchy (Edible Schoolyards is “contemporary progressivism, a kind of win-win, ‘let them eat tarte tatin’ approach to the world”). Her bottom line is that she cannot find “a single study that suggests classroom gardens help students meet the state standards for English and math.” With Edible Schoolyards, she writes, “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 began in the Progressive Era, and it 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 another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outer-course,” and in another it’s abstinence-only education….But with these gardens—and their implication that one of the few important things we as a culture have to teach the next generation is what and how to eat—we’re mocking one of our most ennobling American ideals. Our children don’t get an education because they’re lucky, or because we’ve generously decided to give them one as a special gift. Our children get an education—or should get an education—because they have a right to one.
Fans of the program, including the foodies cited above, are firing back with energy and vitriol. Writing at Salon, Andrew Leonard says Flanagan’s beef is “so large that you could drive a herd of grass-fed cows right through it. If that time is so precious, then why not do away with art and music and physical education classes too?!”
“In Berkeley, and increasingly elsewhere, we also take seriously the idea that understanding what we eat is an essential ingredient in understanding how to live well, healthily and sustainably, in this world, and that it may be just as important, or more, to the prosperous functioning of society as is the ability to play the flute, paint a picture, run the mile or use the Pythagorean theorem. Flanagan rejects that value system, using the poor performance of California schools as a smoke screen for cultural warfare. Her problem with public school gardens is not their effect on test scores, which she can’t measure anyway, but her cultural animosity against the Alice Waters of the world, the foodies, the organic gardeners and locavores and crusaders against factory farms and monoculture agribusinesses.
Flanagan’s evisceration concludes: “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.”
