Caitlin Flanigan is blatantly unaware of the difference between industrial agriculture and sustainable agriculture in her January/February 2010 article in the Atlantic, "Cultivating Failure."
If garden education were an extension of industrial food production, then her assertion that it is directed toward creating "a generation of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers" and "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" would be justifiable. Industrial agriculture is a system that simplifies the complexity of food production to the detriment of the environment, the long term viability of production, and the victimization of workers and it is not fertile ground for school curriculum.
Garden education as it exists today, however, is generally associated with an entirely different type of agriculture. It teaches kids the type of critical thinking, scientific understanding, and practical skills that sustainable farmers use to respond to the challenges of modern American food production (climate change, fresh water depletion, and the end of cheap energy), skills that kids will find useful no matter their career. Teaching children how food is produced does not produce field laborers any more than teaching them how a machine works produces factory workers.
Flanigan's obvious commitment to the scholastic excellence of California's students is squandered because she throws the baby out with the bathwater. She uses her space in the Atlantic to make the false assertion that kids are wasting away their education, spending class time with their heads down picking lettuce. If she knew more about intelligent agricultural systems, she could have used her admirable dedication to academics to advocate for skilled, innovative teachers who can successfully teach math, vocabulary, science and critical thinking in the garden.
Spending an hour and a half per week outside learning the meaning of words like photosynthesis and saturation, using math skills to calculate surface leaf gain as plants grow, and developing analytical skills by creating crop plans while getting some exercise and producing nutritious food can't really be as bad as Flanigan makes it out to be.
