I just finished reading the Atlantic article, Cultivating Failure, and I’m torn between scathing disappointment and downright outrage at the comments and beliefs stated by the author. I’m going to attempt to offer my cynical, sarcastic remarks in a somewhat coherent, calm manner, but no promises.

The entire article is about how school gardens are cheating students out of an education. I kid you not. It begins with the example of an immigrant laborer who’s offspring is forced into what is at one point referred to as “child labor”. But you can’t have a ludicrous comment like that without an equally ludicrous conclusion:

Why not make them build the buses that will take them to and from school, or rotate in shifts through the boiler room?

Ironically, no mention is made to the fact that schools force children into compulsory schooling that may or may not hold any bearing on their future life, happiness or well-being. Instead throughout the article were reasons why school gardens will not help our youth pass the standardized tests. Because, you know, standardized tests are a real indication of one’s future success.

And, as if the notion of learning self-sufficiency, math, science and social cooperation through growing our own food is appalling weren’t bad enough, the numerous attempts to make it into a racial issue really pisses me off.

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.

I’m having a hard time seeing straight at this point. This is not about race. It’s about empowerment. It’s about kids being inspired in what their doing, seeing the value of their own work (and the hard work of others) and cooperating as a community. You do not get that from sitting at a desk in a stuffy, windowless room pouring over a book someone told you to memorize so you can pass yet another standardized test. That just gets you the statistics mentioned in the article, which really just means bored and uninterested kids.

Although she made no qualms about the prejudice she saw, she fails to see how she is simultaneously putting down those of us who have whole-heartedly embraced a hard-earned lifestyle that allows us to feel whole, connected and joyful, and eludes to it as being somehow sub-par to a higher social class that should get their food from a grocery store and leave the manual labor for…who exactly?

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.

Most of the article just pushed the disconnection we so often see in our culture today, pushing toward “progress” and away from true knowledge or understanding. Never once was the question asked where all this progress has taken us. Look what all this endless “progress” got Detroit. Ironically, look what springs up from those ashes.

But the comment that rubbed me the most came from a charter school founder in South LA who also disagreed with the merits of school gardens.

What are you doing to prepare these kids for college? If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That’s all that matters to me.”

Really? That’s all that matters? Getting them into college, continuing them on the endless chase of some elusive prize at the end of a never-ending trails of lies and never enjoying it? What about happiness, joy, passion? What about a spark in their eye and a bounce to their step? What about integrity, community participation, learning the true value of something vs blindly paying a quarter for a tasteless, out-of-season fruit some unknown, underpaid farmer cranked out using questionable practices that you’re not suppose to question or you’ll look ungrateful that their “feeding the starving” even if it is unhealthy and dangerous until you cook it beyond recognition?

Are these standardized tests, so heavily pushed, really going to produce free-thinking, questioning, always-learning individuals who have a passion for life and the living? Is it really going to change a thing in the lives of underprivileged kids?

Let me answer that for you. No. It won’t. They’ll get shuffled along in a system they loathe doing exactly what their told to do until they do one of two things – graduate and realize it didn’t prepare them for “the real world” or drop out in disgust of the system that failed them.

Are school gardens the panacea? Probably not. But they offer a glimmer of hope to the kid shut behind closed doors all day. It gives them a taste of the “real world” and maybe a few more skills to survive in an era when most kids don’t know potatoes are grown underground. Maybe these gardens will spark the interest of a few of them. Maybe they’ll inspire a few to question our food culture, which only leads to questioning other paradigms and eventually could create a free-thinking human being were an apathetic person once sat.

I agree with the author that there is indeed an issue with the public school system.

I disagree that throwing more of the same bland, impractical standardized education at them is going to fix the issue.

We need inspired, engaged kids who want to learn, not thoughtless students that follow commands. And I’ve seen many more eyes light up in a garden than I ever have behind the pages of a mundane, soon-to-be outdated textbook.