How the rise of horticultural training at Toronto schools is bad for students
Illustration: Tavis Coburn.
While we’re busy teaching our kids to tend school gardens, they’re failing provincial tests in reading, writing and math. The folly of the new enviro-propaganda
By Jan Wong
Toronto Life
October 2011
Excerpt:
This fall, hundreds of Toronto students are harvesting beets and zucchini from their school gardens. I say: nice photo op, bad idea. The argument for school gardens assumes that by grubbing in the dirt, kids will learn to love eating vegetables. They won’t think chickens hatch into this world as deep-fried nuggets. And they’ll develop a respect for nature.
Here’s the counter-argument: our students shouldn’t be out scrabbling in the hot sun when one in five can’t pass the Grade 10 literacy test administered by the provincially funded Education Quality and Accountability Office. And while Canadian students score high internationally in reading, mathematics and the sciences, Statistics Canada says our relative ranking is declining due to improved performance by other countries. In this era of global competition, we can’t afford to let other nations nip at our heels.
7 comments
Being a gardener, perhaps I’m biased, but I really don’t see how teaching children how to tend a garden, which has multiple social and ecological benefits, can possibly be a roadblock to reading. And really, one only requires about a grade tow education to read rags like Toronto Life magazine, anyhow. Perhaps Rob Ford and his right wing minions have taken over this already dreary and shallow publication.
This is Jan Wong, a notorious crazy crank, writing in a magazine that will publish anything right now if it creates a controversy. She doesn’t deserve the pixels you are giving her.
I’m sure that MS. Wong has the best of intentions but unfortunately she has lost herself in her own prejudices. Her linking of low test scores in the schools, to schools having student tended gardens, is at best felicitous and at worst an outright fallacy. This article served no other purpose than to voice Ms. Wong’s own frustrations at the failure of schools to produce students who can pass standardized tests. In her article she does nothing more than to voice her own opinions and make dubious connections, all while neglecting to produce any hard evidence as to these two activities having any direct bearing on each other in anyway.
Ms. Wong is free to disagree with me but there is value to having students step away from the books and classrooms. To be out in nature learning about how it works and why it is important not to forsake this part (the natural part) of our existence. Its very sad Ms Wong that you can only equate the “value” of a thing to its ability to make money. There is more to life than just earning money. Take a walk in the park, look at the beauty that is our world and try to understand that some things are actually priceless, like our children, their childhood, and them understanding their place in the natural world thru experience and not just books.
Good article, its funny the remarks against the article. As a parent I worry about educating my children, Wong’s point about wasting school time on school farming for feel good social change is good argument to have. Funny point that the children don’t eat the food they grow show the value of such idea. We shouldn’t shun such ideas.
I have to disagree with this article. Its interesting that we let the “Education quality and accountability office” set the standards for what is of the highest importance in life. The Un index that measure quality of life in many countries rates literacy as one of the most important factors. Cultures and communities around the world are questioning the very underlining philosophy behind this presumption. The Inuit have created their own index that simply doesn’t find literacy scores as the most important. I understand Toronto is a different place than the northern arctic but there are more important things than reading at a grade 10 level and perhaps, just maybe, growing food is one of them.
Sunday Harrison of Green Thumbs Growing Kids wrote an excellent counterpoint to Jan Wong’s rant. You can read it here:
http://greenthumbsgrowingkids.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/snails-pace-of-environmental-education/
Jan Wrong!
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