The article by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic Magazine titled “Cultivating Failure” highlights a wide range of arguments with respects to school gardens and how they affect students’ performance at school. Caitlin’s argument is that these gardens are stripping students of valuable time to become “educated”. The exact words are “dooming urban students to a life of poverty and “cultivating failure,” just as expressed in her title. The author argues that even immigrant students from Mexico are being pushed back to the fields of manual labor through their middle school garden. The content of this article is relevant not just to the students in high school but also those in colleges as it juxtaposes some of the factors that affect productive education, and how education can be limited by activities such as gardening. According to Caitlin Flanagan, schools are cheating the most vulnerable students. The author in her scathing attack on the school gardens calls them "a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproven, even unexamined". From the quote, it is evident that the author does not support the idea of the school garden and views them as a waste of time to most students. However, it is not hugely correct to argue that the schools are lowering the standards of education in the schools. Caitlin Flanagan does not give statistical evidence to her claim. She does not justify her allegations with proven facts and figures. When she argues that the school gardens subject students to menial labor, she ignores the fact that the menial labor is part of the curriculum and that it helps build the students and prepare them for the future. Flanagan argues that “although garden-based curricula are advanced as a means of redressing a wide spectrum of poverty’s ills, the animating spirit behind them is impossible to separate from the haute-bourgeois predilections of the Alice Waters fan club.” From this quote, does it then mean that school gardens are only ideal for the privileged? These are arguments that are widely refutable.
Works Cited
Michael Fries, K. (2010). Failure to cultivate: Why school gardens ARE important. Retrieved from https://grist.org/article/cultivating-failure-why-school-gardens-are-important/
