Caitlin Flanagan Demonstrates What a Deficient Education Will Do to You

I have long considered Caitlin Flanagan the most flagrantly stupid woman in print. 

A rich woman who lives in one of Los Angeles' most pretentious neighborhoods with a staff of many, yet has the blazing nerve to tell less well-off working wives that they ought to stay home with their kids, Flanagan is the Phyllis Schlafly of the Late Boomer set. She writes about domestic subjects in a reactionary rage so extreme that it often seems self-wounding. If the more politically correct moms in Flanagan's neighborhood decided it was healthy for kids to be raised with pets, Flanagan would slaughter puppies on her front lawn just to prove them wrong. 

Of course, my dislike of Flanagan's work would be relevant to exactly nothing if Flanagan had just stayed outside the garden gate.

But now she's barreled into Garden Rant territory in a piece in The Atlantic called "Cultivating Failure," determined to despoil that humble little Eden called the school garden.

Flanagan's argument? That prompted by hippie idealists like chef Alice Waters, the California Department of Education has allowed gardens "to hijack the curricula of so many schools." Flanagan links the appalling failures of California's public schools to the fact that more than 40% of them (really?) now have school gardens. She purports to be extremely worried that underprivileged kids will wind up as manual laborers because they are learning how to grow lettuce rather than learning Shakespeare. (At Alice Waters' adopted Berkeley middle school, the kids spend an hour and a half a week cooking and gardening. Oh, the horror!)

Meanwhile, Flanagan herself is the best possible argument for why the school day ought to include a bit of digging in the dirt. Because her (presumably superior) education has clearly left enormous gaps in her understanding of human life.

Let's consider these lacunae.

1.  The natural world. Flanagan's distaste for gardening is palpable. She argues that the point of education is to lift us above "the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt," not bring us back to it. Flanagan clearly has not the slightest sense of how uplifting the experience of growing a bit of food can be. Princess, why don't you give the gardener a day off and try sticking a few tomato plants into the soil?  You might be shocked at how pleasurable it is. You also might find that engaging in the "desperate daily scrabble" gives you a new insight into the human condition that you have thus far failed to glean from books.

2. Children. Flanagan sees the school garden as a distraction from the business of a child's life, learning "Emerson and Euclid."  But Flanagan is fooling herself if she assumes that were all the school gardens to disappear, kids might become more interested in great literature. Ha! I know lots of twelve year-olds, and they not reading Dickens, they are reading Stephenie Meyer, a writer who has prompted nauseatingly tender memories from Flanagan herself about her own girlhood. Sorry, I think it's far healthier for girls to exhaust their bodies working with a shovel than to waste their minds fantasizing about vampire dudes.

3. Immigrants.  Again, finding the very idea of farming distasteful, Flanagan argues that school gardens are an insult to immigrant kids whose parents just escaped the fields in search of a better life.  Well, my aunt was an immigrant who grew up on a less-than-charming pig farm with less-than-charming parents who left the farm to her younger brother, the only male in their brood.  So she left everything behind and came to America, where farmland was comparatively cheap. At the age of 81, in the midst of chemotherapy for a brain tumor, she spent her entire last summer out on her tractor.  Some people come to America not to leave the farm, but to own it.

4.  The diets of American children.   Flanagan scoffs at the notion that school gardens are valuable because a lot of city kids grow up in places where they have little access to fresh produce. Venturing briefly outside her life of extreme wealth to check out the supermarkets in L.A.'s Compton, she finds their produce sections quite passable. She has clearly never visited Detroit, where there are no major supermarkets to serve a sprawling city of 900,000 people, many of them far too poor to afford a car.  Flanagan also makes the highly insulting claim that the poor eat badly because their lives are so bleak, they need the thrills offered by junk food. Well, almost 18% percent of American kids between 12 and 19 are obese, and many of them will go on to develop diabetes and a host of other diet-related diseases.  These are not just poor kids, but middle class and rich kids, too. Our entire culture is hellbent on shoving Coke and chips down our kids' throats, and most American parents, in every economic class, do little to stop it.  Any program that counteracts the insane way we feed our kids is not just worthwhile, but positively important. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the appalling numbers of American children who suffer from asthma and allergic rhinitis because they never play in the dirt.

5. Chez Panisse. Flanagan reports that she has experienced "oppressively sanctimonious and conversation-busting service" in Alice Waters' famous restaurant. The fact that she can't resist mentioning it, even though it has nothing to do with her argument, makes me fear that this is the real impetus behind the piece: She's decided to draw and quarter Waters for the insult. (Next time, try eating upstairs in the cafe with the hoi polloi. Food's just as good and atmosphere's more relaxed.)

Flanagan accuses Waters of foisting a "let them eat tarte tatin" attitude on hardscrabble public schools. Naturally, this seems entirely inappropriate to the class-obsessed Flanagan, who worries hysterically that the students in these schools, thus cheated of a proper education in favor of a too-gourmet vision of their futures, will become wards of the taxpayers, "a permanent, uneducated underclass. The state...will have to shoulder them in adulthood."

It's pretty impolitic of Flanagan to borrow even a phrase from Marie Antoinette, because if anyone in this picture resembles that privileged pitiless fool, it's Flanagan herself. But I do like the rallying cry Flanagan has coined and will embrace it.

Let the kids eat tarte tatin!  Make sure to let all the kids have a bite!

What's wrong with introducing kids of all classes to beauty and taste in the form of gorgeous plants and wonderful food?  How is it so different from having them read Shakespeare and solve algebra problems?  Unlike, say, a bag of Doritos and a standardized test, these subjects make us civilized. They help us rise above the "desperate daily scrabble" and wrest new meanings from our lives. 

I'd go so far as to say no education is complete without some understanding of plants, soil, food, cooking, the power of the sun, and the cycles of life.  If I could, I would send Caitlin Flanagan right back to school to learn them.

Comments

[Steve Cissel]

God created man in His own image.

After He created the heaven's and the earth, he rested, then He PLANTED a garden (Genesis 2:8).

God followed that up by creating a man, breathed life into him, and placed him in the garden to tend to it.

Man has a God given inherent desire to PLANT a garden.

Of course it needs to be taught in school. It is one of the seeds of life.

The CF' of the world need to get their head's on straight.

Steve

[Lois J. de Vries]

BRAVISSIMA, Michele!

[Mary Sizemore]

She is so blatantly stupid and clueless that responding to her may give her more credibility than she deserves, but then, people like this are like weeds and need to be uprooted before they become established.

[Theresa Loe/GardenFreshLiving]

Hear that? It is me clapping.

Good job Michele.

I too got fired up to write about this. And as I said in my post, I find humor in the fact that CF can have such a high opinion of herself and then go on to put her foot in her mouth.

http://www.gardenfreshliving.com/2010/01/an-attack-on-school-gardens.html

Thanks for stating so well what many of us are feeling.

[Two Green Acres]

I can't believe anyone gives this woman any air time.

[Eric in Maryland]

Bravo, Michele. Someone needs to gift Caitlin Flanagan a stepladder so she can get over herself.

[Allenwbush]

Epicurus and New Orleans' Samuel J. Green Charter School have got it going in the garden

http://humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/comments/learning_the_aubergines_beets_carrots/

[Chiot's Run]

Oh yes, because I so often use Shakespear in my career. A good work ethic and being humble enough to do anything will get you farther in life than being able to quote the great poets.

No to mention having basic skills will help people during the tough times. None of us would be here if all of our great grandparents had studied poetry instead of working in their gardens.

[Ramble on Rose]

Thank you, Michele! And I am so glad someone pointed out how wretched Flanagan's article on the Twilight series was! It is unfortunate the The Atlantic continues to give her a platform for her verbal vomiting.

[Alex]

Man I like you - I actually couldn't make it through the Atlantic piece so thanks for delivering a well-deserved smack-down to a pretentious windbag (and for toughing out the read that I couldn't stomach).

And I like that stepladder comment...

[MA]

Michele,

Brilliant rebuttal, and I thank you. Now, please, Atlantic, print this piece.

[Caroline Homer]

Standing ovation! In the words of Stephen Colbert: Caitlin Flanagan, you've been NAILED.

[frank@nycgarden]

Thank you Michelle for writing out these points.

Flanigan's argument is the kind of argument one can only generate in one's own mind. If tested, out in the world, by visiting and communicating, her argument would falter (as the rant shows). Her argument is the kind of argument that only survives in a bubble. I suppose her bubble is patting her on the back and saying "good job." She obviously feels threatened by Waters, and I can only assume her apparent "concern" for the laborers is out of distaste for them. After all, they came to "America" to be more like her. And if they don't, God help them, because she won't ever see anything but a grubbing, sad laborer in the dirt instead of a human being.

I think it was this article that taught me the essence of a "conservative": people who despise labor. Isn't the deeper worry that if you teach someone to grow things, they're going to want the land to do so? Creating desire outside of the industrial-consumer system creates problems for the rich who understand that property rightfully belongs to them. Do you think that this could be an underpinning of a conservative lashing of garden education?

[Liza]

Excellent work! Thank you!

[Susan Reimer]

You have to give CF points for articulation, and for carrying an argument through. And for not being Ann Coulter. She writes this kind of "hand grenade into the picnic" stuff all the time.

[Dorothy Borders]

Excellent! This may be the best rant ever! There's nothing to add or delete - just, ditto.

[kate]

Well, I'm glad CF wrote the piece - glad it was published in Atlantic - because it sparked this conversation, and this particular rant. I'm grateful we can disagree and converse about things that are really important in our lives. Sometimes I wish such conversations focused more on the ideas rather than being so personalized - but I must admit, it's kind of fun to read the vitriol, too. (Perhaps unfortunately.) Nevertheless, thanks, Michele, for a well-argued piece.

[mary]

I'm not against teaching kids to garden, but some of you are living in a dreamworld, I think.

My grandparents and great grandparents were farmers and crofters....they were poor, malnourished, and their very survival depended the whims of the weather and the ebb and flow of pests and disease. Thank god they moved to this country and sent my parents to school to study Shakespeare and learn how to read and write.

Growing things is a wonderful, life-affirming activity. For most of us it is something that enriches our lives...we are luckier than most of the millions of people in the world who rely on the earth for their very survival. And thank god our kids have the chance to go to school and study Shakespeare and poetry and learn to write and to think so that they can one day get good jobs, buy their own homes, and plant gardens -- if they choose to.

[Michelle]

*applause!*

[Foy Update - Cook. Garden. Write. Repeat.]

Damn straight!

[Carol]

Brava! Excellent rant! I find it hard to believe anyone could be so blind to the truth. How utterly absurd!

[allanbecker-gardenguru]

Michelle, it is unfortunate that you are preaching to the choir. Most, if not all, of your readers will agree with your opinion about the Ms.Flanagan. This commendable protest needs a wider audience in order to rebut her claims.

[Christopher C NC]

I was flabbergasted and rendered speechless when reading Ms. Flanagan's little essay. I thought Michele might have more to say. It is a shame the Atlantic chose not to have comments on that article that was a lot like some whack job sneaking into a school garden and spraying it with glyphosate.

[Gardenology]

Gardening is like so many other important pieces in the puzzle of life that everyone should be exposed to when young. Like musical instruments, literature, sports, cuisine, finances, and a myriad of other things, it gives important exposure to a young person trying to learn what their interests are, and makes them well rounded adults.

[Susan]

Thank you thank you thank you for putting into words the rage I experienced when reading Flanagan's latest piece of garbage. She is always wrong about everything, especially this. Why she gets paid for her idiocy is beyond me. Especially when her sermons appear in magazines I pay for.