Are school gardens a good or a bad thing?

Ouch! Many hard-working volunteers I know will be hit hard by an article by Caitlin Flanagan in the current Atlantic magazine charging that school gardens are a patronizing fraud that wastes the precious instructional time of poor children whose real chance at a good life lies in focusing on learning to read, do arithmetic and be good citizens.

Blogger and school garden volunteer Ed Bruske has responded angrily on his blog, The Slow Cook. And there has been huge blog and Twitter action about the subject.

My own take: School gardens work as well as their schools do. The principal has to really be on board. The teachers need to be prepared to truly integrate the lessons of the garden into the reading, math and science curriculum. It can't just be a feel-good project where the kids spend some time in the sunshine and the teacher gets a break while the volunteers babysit for an hour a couple of times a week.

Like schools in general, school gardens tend to work best in middle-class areas where most students get a head start on reading and math at home. They work best where children have good teachers who get lots of resources and support and where there are active, involved and educated parents and neighbors to volunteer. For those kids, a school garden is unquestionably an enhancement of their education.

But in poorer and immigrant neighborhoods where most children don't get that head start at home, every educational challenge is much greater. A school garden can't cure that. For a school garden in a poor neighborhood to really pay off in educational gains is going to take a heroic teacher and a visionary principal as well as a devoted cadre of volunteers. Such situations are rare in, for example, the Chicago Public Schools.

Years of expensive program changes, magnet schools and other reforms haven't budged the test-results needle much in the Chicago schools, especially in the ones where students struggle most. It's unreasonable to expect school gardens to do what firing principals, retraining teachers, busing kids across the city and shutting failing schools down altogether has not.

Would I want a child of mine to lose math or reading instruction time to work in a garden? No, I would not. But my child would be spending time in a garden at home, as I did when I was small. I was taught to garden as I was taught to read: not by my school but by my parents. I was a privileged child.

Still, I persist in believing that it is valuable for children to garden. I believe that understanding how a plant works and how it is related to a person helps children understand their world. I still believe that getting over the fear of earthworms helps a child develop empathy. I believe that knowing where food comes from because you grew some yourself helps make you a better and more informed citizen. I believe that children learn math best if they have something real to figure out, such as how many tomato plants will fit. I believe a school garden -- if it has the right support from all the right adults -- can be a door to a larger world for a child. But that's a big if.

The best response to Caitlin Flanagan's critique should be a demand from the volunteers whose labor and enthusiasm makes school gardens happen for better research to prove their benefits and to figure out how they can really help with the core curriculum. Volunteers should insist that school administrations set expectations and provide training and support for teachers to make that connection. They should insist that their hard work have a chance to really teach children by being made part of a school's curriculum in meaningful ways.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.