Caitlin Flanagan’s review of school gardens in California in The Atlantic (“Cultivating

Failure”) is an interesting piece of argument: on the one hand, she makes an impassioned plea for education to be accessible to all, particularly minority students; on the other, she clearly condemns one of the more popular and well-funded areas of the curriculum for many schools.

Her argument centers on the conclusion that education should not focus on programs such as gardening but concentrate solely on teaching kids the basics they need to succeed in today’s society. I found this argument ultimately persuasive, given the points used to justify school gardening and the need for children to focus on subjects such as math and writing. But

Flanagan’s presentation in this article is often inflammatory, using language and red herring fallacies clearly meant to manipulate the audience. This argument could turn many people “off” in its presentation, even if you agree with the author.

Flanagan’s argument begins with Alice Waters, the pioneer of school gardening in

Berkeley, California, and then concentrates on Waters’ philosophy and arguments for this program, the use of school gardens across California, and the impacts on school curriculum and student performance. Waters’ program is extremely popular with many schools in California, not just with teachers and students but also volunteers, celebrity sponsors, and agricultural groups

(Flanagan 2010). This popularity is due to a combination of ideas including the need to show kids “useful work,” help them to understand where their food comes from, and give them access to fresh produce. According to Flanagan, roughly a third of California schools now include a school gardening program into the curriculum; in Berkeley, the garden is brought into other classes as well, such as writing recipes in English classes and measuring the beds in math

(Flanagan 2010). But Flanagan questions the real utility of these programs in helping students

1 learn the basic math, English and other subjects that they need to succeed in education; these programs appear to be distracting educators from helping students learn these subjects and may be diverting funds away from them as well. There is no hard evidence showing that these programs actually help students learn other subjects and no impact on test performance on state exams. Given that California has a population with large concentrations of minorities, particularly Hispanic children that may need extra help due to language and environmental issues

(they may be the first children in their families to go to school full-time and could have a chance to attend college), California needs to maintain its focus on what is the best way to learn subjects, and not how to include spurious subject matter into the curriculum, such as gardening (Flanagan

2010).

Overall, this argument looks sound. Flanagan shows that school gardening may be taking too much time away from other subjects and that its real utility for students in terms of teaching them necessary skills and providing them with food is limited. She anticipates many of the arguments used to support school gardens, including the argument that without these gardens, children of poor neighborhoods would not have decent food. Since the 1990s, Flanagan argues, reforms outside school gardens have encouraged the spread of grocery stores into poor neighborhoods. Also, many so-called “ethnic markets” in these communities may in fact have better quality and cheaper food than regular stores (Flanagan 2010). The point that this will teach kids to eat better may be irrelevant in any case, as they are not the ones who make the purchases. Several years after the school reforms from No Child Left Behind, California has required higher standards for math, English, science and other subjects; it is clear that any reforms to the school system should improve student performance in these classes. But school

2 gardens apparently do not help student performance and if this is true, that alone may be a reason not to support them.

Despite the strength of these points, Flanagan makes several mistakes in her argument.

First, she is clearly making a value judgement that learning to write is more important than learning to plant spinach; while this might make sense to many, her beliefs color her language, assumptions and reasoning. Flanagan targets Alice Waters in many passages as a dilettante in education with no real justification for her view that gardening is a worthwhile subject in schools. Flanagan uses ad hominem attacks to do this, such as describing Walters as a well-to-do restauranteur with “a weird, almost erotic power” she has over potential volunteers in her school gardening programs (Flanagan 2010). Characterizations like these are neither objective nor useful in understanding why this entrepreneur’s ideals may not be worth following. It would have been more appropriate to show why Waters’ philosophy itself was not helping students where it counted in terms of learning subjects. But this critique is not really done in the piece.

Another major criticism I have is the use of racism as a manipulative element of

Flanagan’s argument. In several places, Flanagan points out that Hispanic children, many of whom may be the children of immigrants, do not go to school to learn under this program but instead go out to the garden to work “under a hot sun and pick lettuce” (Flanagan 2010). She compares teaching Hispanic children to garden under this program as the equivalent of “a sharecropping curriculum for African American students...bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might be troublesome if they actually got an education” (Flanagan 2010). The author’s research shows a clear disparity in test performance between Hispanics and other minority groups that indicates more attention needs to be paid to

3 basic classroom learning for Hispanic kids. But the implication that there is racism in the decision to encourage kids to school garden is not just a red herring that could divert the reader; it is a reprehensible way to argue. There are clearly better ways to make the case that particular groups need attention in California school without charging Waters and her supporters with trying to keep minority students down in lower-paying sectors of the workforce.

Finally, it is important to remember that Flanagan’s argument deals mainly with

California in terms of content and focus. The information on the scope of this program and its effects are all confined to this particular state, so there is an element of limited generalizability here. I would like to see a comparison with results from other states; given the spread of the community gardening movement across America, I am sure that some school gardening programs exist in other states. Do these locations, where test scores are also now important, show the same lack of improvement in performance when gardens are incorporated into the curriculum?

As noted above, I believe Caitlin Flanagan has a point with her overall argument against school gardening. But her poor choice of words in many places, abuse of racial stereotypes (even if, in this case, it is used to argue for minority children in education) and limited scope of her research makes this argument limited in whether or not it proves that school gardening has little utility in schools. This article definitely could have been better written.

Works Cited:

Flanagan, Caitlin. “Cultivating Failure,” The Atlantic, January/February 2010 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/cultivating-failure/7819/1/), accessed February 28, 2010.

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