It’s not hard to persuade the persuaded. Nevertheless, I found Caitlan Flannigan’s takedown of the disturbing nexus of local food and progressive school reform to be spot on. Like the broader green school movement I wrote about recently, these moves to indoctrinate students into the social fad of the moment seem destined to contaminate not just the obvious subjects, like health and science classes, but the entire curriculum. At Martin Luthor King Jr. Middle School, for instance, Flannigan found:
In English class students composed recipes, in math they measured the garden beds, and in history they ground corn as a way of studying pre-Columbian civilizations. Students’ grades quickly improved at King, which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible.
Flannigan aptly describes the movement as driven 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 other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
Thursday ~ February 4th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Funky J
It’s a well known fact that when children grow their own food, they’re more likely to eat that food and develop a more open mind towards food.
I’m living proof of that. I used to hate everything, but when I was young my mum grew her own food, not because she had some grand idea about education but mostly out of necessity because we were poor. I grew to love capsicum, peas, beans and stone fruits because of that. Now, I’ll even try eel when it’s put in front of me! (although I wouldn’t recommend it – tastes like rubber soaked in fish oil!)
I fail to see why this trend is “disturbing”.
The claim that people are writing recipes and not reading the Crucible is laughable. There was a time in schools where the Crucible was not considered worthy of study. Does that mean those who pushed for the Crucible to be read by classes and put it on the curriculum at the risk of their careers were responsible for a “disturbing trend”? Then again, there were people out there who do think “pop” literature like the Crucible was the downfall of America… but we call them “idiots” today.
Furthermore, the the internet was meant to be a “fad”. Now those schools who jumped in early with teaching students are faring much better than those who were reluctant to spend the money on computers.
This attack is nothing but “culture wars” disguised as “won’t someone think of the children!”