2.2.10 - Lisa Bennett - I was speaking today with a mom at my sons’ school. She was concerned about a teacher who was doing such a poor job that even his students were complaining that they weren’t learning enough.
The School Garden Debate: To Weep or Reap?
By Lisa Bennett
I was speaking today with a mom at my sons’ school. She was concerned about a teacher who was doing such a poor job that even his students were complaining that they weren’t learning enough.
“We’re all worried about the economy,” she said. In this climate, any sign that a school (even an excellent or basically good one) may be failing to absolutely and definitively prepare our children for whatever the future will bring is likely to provoke greater anxiety than usual.
This collective economic angst, I believe, is what Caitlin Flanagan played into in “Cultivating Failure,” an article that lambastes school gardens in the January/February 2010 Atlantic. But to separate the angst from the facts, it is necessary to first look at the angst and then the facts.