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Remember home ec? And its male corollary—shop class? Girls learned to keep a clean house, prepare a meal, and balance a checkbook, while guys got to make birdhouses and use circular saws. The former was decried—understandably for the era—by feminists as the enemy of gender progress; the latter was scuttled as boys ditched hand tools in favor of digital screens and joysticks. The shift away from vocational skills toward more test-based learning was initially viewed as a positive step toward getting kids on the college track, but it has become clear that we’ve lost something rather integral to the process of cultural, social, and intellectual development: basic skills.
The culling of classroom minutes devoted to simple tasks like changing oil or sewing a button may have played a part in successfully designing a curriculum as a means to an end: study subject, pass test, go to college. But it had the unintended consequence of rendering most Gen X and Yers helpless in the quotidian realm—reliant on their moms to do laundry and on the microwave to cook their meals. With all eyes on prepping for Harvard, even the tying of shoes has become a lost art as nearly every preschoolers’ laces have by now been replaced by Velcro tabs.
We can compensate for much of lost basic life skills, but the act of doing, of making, of watching raw materials merge into a thing or a meal—that’s been in short supply in classrooms. The introduction in the last decade of school garden programs has been a pragmatic move in the right direction, familiarizing youth with the origins and growth processes of their food while instilling in them a willingness to get dirty and cultivate a meal with their own two hands.
While learning to garden seems innocuous enough, not everyone has been in favor of adding it back into the school day. In the Atlantic in 2010, Caitlin Flanagan argued that sending kids out to till the soil represents a step back for education:
“On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks through the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce. . . . A 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 that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might otherwise have spent reading important books or learning higher math. . . .”
I remember reading this essay and thinking that clearly the author had never been present when a kid had dug up and admired “ugly” potatoes or seen him marvel at the wriggling of fat earthworms that emerged when he had done so. As one online commenter to her essay put it, “Are you truly positing that having grade school students spend one to two hours a week outside growing vegetables and fruit plants in a garden is a huge drain on the California educational system?”
Certainly not every child will take a shine to gardening, just as not every student loves reading or math, but school garden programs have proven themselves an invaluable educational resource. Like the home economics and shop classes of yore, they teach something practical to be sure, and they also celebrate collaboration, community, and the simple satisfaction that comes from following something from start to finish.
Any good teacher knows that children learn not just from books and tests, worksheets and quizzes, but through projects, interaction, and experiences. Though it’s been decades since I sat in her book-and travel-ephemera-filled classroom, I still remember with remarkable clarity my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bergeron. Among the year’s worth of engaging class projects, she had us build our visions for a City of the Future (mine was a George Jetson–worthy landscape of upended plastic champagne glasses spray-painted silvery blue). Today, I write about architecture, design, and urbanism for a living. Coincidence? Perhaps, but no worksheet or pop quiz would have led me here.
In urban areas in particular, children are spending more and more time inside and less time being active. More screen time and less exercise are perhaps inevitable trends as technology-oriented learning increases and public funding for physical education drops, but some of the ripple effects are worth attention and prevention.
Consider the distinctly twenty-first-century problem of what Richard Louv has described as nature-deficit disorder, wherein children spend less and less time outdoors, leading to a wide range of behavioral problems. The past decade has seen an alarming spike in childhood obesity, juvenile diabetes, antisocial behavior, attention deficit and/or hyper-activity disorders, and there’s little sign of a change to this trend. Can a school garden program eliminate all these ills? No, but it sure can help.
First and foremost, school garden programs get kids outside and begin to reacquaint them with the natural world. Once there, they’re getting dirty (another increasingly rarified activity in our antibacterial-obsessed world) and discovering where food comes from and how it grows. Artificially lit supermarket year-round abundance yields to an utterly different reality as kids discover what grows when (and what it looks like before it’s processed and packaged). They become attuned to weather patterns, seasons, and the behavior of bugs, good and bad. From there, it’s not a huge leap to talk about everything from phases of the moon to entomology to nutrition and healthy eating.
Anything that grows can become the focus of a classroom curriculum as proven by REAL School Gardens in Texas which developed its very own Potato Scholars Program to engage students in math, science, language arts, nutrition, and environmental education. Once harvested, the kids’ potato crop is donated to their local food bank. As an elementary school teacher who participates in one of REAL School Gardens’ seventy-four programs explains, the garden “is central because we do reading, writing, and arithmetic out there. Every day we’re collecting scientific data . . . they learn about volume, ratio, rates of application. . . . We look at a rain gauge and talk about [measurement] and the fractions of an inch. . . . We then start breaking that into decimals. It’s a very integrated curriculum with math and science.”
Utilized with care and creativity, school gardens provide real opportunities to combat troubling trends regarding children’s learning, health, and parental support. “School gardens are more than pretty places on campus . . . [they’re] living laboratories for investigations into real-world problems and provide practical opportunities to grow a new generation of innovators,” executive director Jeanne McCarty adds. There’s also strong evidence that experiential learning programs like REAL Schools make learning fun without sacrificing educational objectives and academic performance. Further, at a time when consumption of fruits and vegetables is at a treacherous low for many youth, research has shown that children who grow their own food are more likely to eat it. Nearly 17 percent of the students of the REAL Schools are obese, and empowering them to make better food choices on their own is one of the best ways to facilitate healthy habits that will stick around through adulthood and get passed down when those students have their own children. That self-motivated decision making is key, and it stands to reason that when people start making better choices for their own health, they are also more inclined toward thinking about the health of their community and the environment. A six-year-old is more likely to wear the shirt she picked out herself; she’s also more inclined to eat the carrot she picked from the ground herself.
Developing school garden programs is very much about creating interactive learning spaces. As Rebecca Lemos of Washington DC’s City Blossoms explains, “[These spaces are] for children to use their creativity and combined strength and skills to learn how to grow and maintain fantastic yet functioning gardens.”
These gardens, she continues, provide opportunities to learn about time management and the process of planning out a project step-by-step, as well as teaching careful observation, problem solving, and handling the challenges of managing a living system, where sometimes plants fail to thrive and produce. Unlike instant test results, gardening offers children situations in which they can think creatively in the long term; it is a project that progresses over a continuum and in the context of natural forces and seasonal rhythms.
A program like City Blossoms emphasizes the relationship between schools and their respective communities. There are other options as well, such as Partner Gardens, which works with the children, staff, and members of a school or community organization to create and maintain a garden, and also Community Green Spaces, a program whereby large plots of land are loaned to community members by private owners.
Lemos and her colleagues have been amazed by the kids’ increasing awareness of the many elements of the natural world around them, the diversity of the different foods and plants that can be grown, the interconnectedness of their world and the world outside. “In our student gardeners,” she says, “we see growing desires to access and use green spaces in their communities, which they see as theirs to shape and share.”
The effects are not necessarily instantaneous, cautions Lemos, but, she explains, “We have noticed that gardens are usually the inspiration to create more changes in their environments, whether it is at a school or community center, that will influence attitudes of the community as a whole—for example, starting recycling in the classrooms, choosing healthy snacks that can be made using ingredients from the gardens, and wanting to spend more time outside interacting with nature or with each other.”
In Los Angeles, the United States’ second largest city, the Garden School Foundation operates a three-quarter-acre vegetable and quarter-acre native garden in the schoolyard at 24th Street Elementary School and runs classes for the students five days a week. Each of the nearly one thousand students attends six seed-to-table cooking and nutrition classes every year in which they plant, harvest, and prepare fresh produce from the garden, finishing the class by sitting down to eat together. Interviews done after the close of the six classes, says GSF’s Julia Cotts, “show an increased participation in what students cook at home, including more cooking with their families, as well as increased demand for produce from the supermarket.”
As is the case with most successful school garden programs, the Garden School Foundation is tailored to the needs of the community it serves. As Cotts explains, “For children living in poor urban areas in Los Angeles, nature is extremely scarce. Those open green spaces that do exist are very often plagued by crime and aren’t safe for children to enjoy. First and foremost, gardens are a way for children to connect to a nature that has disappeared from our city. Additionally, schools are increasingly drilling students solely to achieve on tests while extracurricular activities are defunded. Gardens give children hands-on, experiential learning opportunities where they get to investigate, explore, learn for themselves, and teach each other, building essential life skills they don’t have the opportunity to learn anywhere else.” Addressing issues of food access is key: Obesity and diet-related disease are a huge epidemic in these areas, says Cotts, and “gardens are a surefire way to get kids to eat more vegetables. There’s nothing more true than the mantra ‘If they grow it, they’ll eat it,’ something we see during every one of our cooking and nutrition classes conducted in the garden.”
School gardens can’t end urban poverty or class inequality, restore strapped education budgets, or eliminate childhood obesity, but they’re having an impact. They’re changing attitudes and habits, fostering collaboration and new ideas, and creating community. As the quixotic artist and writer Maira Kalman observed on her New York Times blog when she visited the kids at Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard, “They pick beans and kale and pineapple guavas. They roast peppers. They churn butter. And they cook. And then they sit down together and eat and talk. And philosophize. . . . Then they fold the tablecloth. And sweep. And do all the things that families have been doing for hundreds of years.”
