“We observe cosmic cycles, the moon cycles,” explains Eva Cabaca, the school’s gardening teacher. “We are healing land with special preparations. We are sensitive to the seasons so that everything works in a harmonious way.” When I ask if the students also learn to butcher the chickens and goats, she recoils. “No! No!” she says, shaking her head. Waldorf students brown bag lunch, so they rarely eat the produce, except at a single “harvest” dinner to which families are invited each fall.
Winchester Junior and Senior Public School, which serves Cabbagetown and St. James Town, has one of the city’s biggest school gardens, an 11,000-square-foot plot where portable classrooms once stood. That’s because a charitable eco-organization called Green Thumbs Growing Kids, which focuses its efforts on inner-city schools, has been working with Winchester for 10 years.
In the 2009–10 school year, the Grade 7s and 8s at Winchester built raised vegetable beds using clay blocks. The Grade 3 curriculum includes a section on plants and soils. Meanwhile, almost half of these third-graders failed to meet the provincial standard in 2010 in reading, writing and math. Nearly two thirds of the 380 students at Winchester speak a language other than English at home, and many of them are on a breakfast program. Clearly, these are among our most vulnerable students.
Even if you accept that gardening has some redeeming educational value, students aren’t getting the straight goods. On a sunny noon hour in the garden, I’m speaking to Sunday Harrison, the executive director of Green Thumbs, when a little girl runs over to report an imminent atrocity: a little boy is about to squish a snail. “We don’t kill it,” Harrison says firmly.
After the kids leave, I double-check exactly why we don’t kill snails. Because they’re good for the garden? “Actually not,” says Harrison. “They eat the leafy greens. But these kids grow up in high-rise buildings. It’s more important to teach them about habitat than pest management.” I sigh. After all those years blindly following Mao, I’m allergic to propaganda of any kind.
At least the cafeteria at Winchester uses the produce it grows, mainly because 150 students depend on the $3 lunch program. “I have to disguise Swiss chard before I throw it in the pasta,” says Charmyne Urquhart, the head chef. “The hand blender is my best friend.”
Here’s my problem: if knowing how to grow a potato is part of a good education, then we should also be teaching kids to fix leaky toilets. And that’s why I think Bendale Business and Technical Institute gets it right. Located in the heart of Scarborough, the high school offers a wide range of technical subjects, including carpentry, hairdressing, auto mechanics and, yes, plumbing. Bendale also teaches horticulture—serious horticulture, on its acre of gardens. Once the budding farmers harvest the produce, the business students sell it at an on-site market. Any surplus goes into the cafeteria kitchen, to be prepared by student chefs.
Bendale’s horticultural students get summer jobs at Sheridan Nurseries and Rouge Park. Landscaping companies hire them as soon as they graduate. Several students plan to attend Niagara Parks School of Horticulture. One freshly minted grad, 18-year-old Jeremy Sales, just started a degree program in horticulture at the University of Guelph. He told me he plans to be a farmer.
Bravo for Bendale. But it isn’t the average Toronto school—it’s a shining exception. For those of us who don’t intend to be farmers, let’s stop mucking around.
OH PLEASE. DING DING DING Ring the alarm bells!!
Sorry what was the point of this article really?
Equating poor testing grades to working in the garden(I’m assuming that’s not the ONLY thing they’re doing in class) is beyond dangerous. Ms. Wong’s examples are used as an across the board standard when they sound more like rare occurrences trumpeted up to be the end times of education.
Shame on Toronto Life for publishing such fear mongering garbage.
September 29, 2011 at 10:51 am | by JMVery poorly defended position on environmental education in Toronto. Ms. Wong’s admitted history of blindly following Maoism in her youth leads me to believe that she thinks that province wide government testing actually works. ha.
September 29, 2011 at 11:21 am | by vcThis line of thinking inevitably leads to cutting funding for arts programs in schools too, in favour of increasing academic scores. A well-rounded education is important.
September 29, 2011 at 11:36 am | by TorontoDudeSo the extra half hour these kids get to spend outside doing physical activity will solve the problem of academic under-accomplishment? Perhaps if parents took a more active role in ensuring kids were on the right academic track from home, rather than passing off all responsibility to faculty and writing alarmist columns online…
September 29, 2011 at 11:51 am | by AaronThis is required reading for understanding how the work of Jan Wong in Canada’s publications is bad for forward-thinking people.
September 29, 2011 at 1:33 pm | by DonaldWell I’m going to partway agree with Ms. Wong. For the record, my family buys our produce through a CSA share in an Uxbridge farm, we get our meat similarly, and we do a lot of home education about the environment. So it’s not that I don’t think these things are important.
But, my son is in grade 1 in a TDSB school. I was at curriculum night last night and the teacher let us know that there is no way she can keep track of the various reading levels of her 19 students. I believe her. The students have 40 minutes of gym PER DAY plus two recesses and an hour lunch. They have 40 minutes of music a week, computer lab, and library. They are 6, so coming in and going out, changing shoes, etc. all takes time.
I am truly wondering when it is they are supposed to learn the basics. The end point of the math curriculum in grade one is that students be able to count to 100 in 1, 2s, 5s, and 10s, and compose and decompose numbers up to…20. Is that really far enough along to really, truly address the environmental issues we have via science and engineering in the future?
The answer to help kids progress is to have the parents reading and monitoring reading levels at home. Well, of course as responsible parents we’ll do that. No argument from me that this is important.
But that time is time not spent in our garden, or outside being physically active. So…I don’t see the win from a health perspective, here; it just means kids with parents working tons of hours just to stay afloat don’t have the support they need to _read_ while they might be _gardening_ at school. Personally, I would rather all the kids read at school, and garden at home if the family can manage.
I believe in arts education. I believe in garden and environmental education, health education and math education and reading and writing and science and history and geography and all kinds of things.
But we can’t do it all, all the time.
Is tending a garden really the best way for schools to do environmental education? I’m not sure. As an after-school choice, I think it’s a fantastic club idea.
In class, I would kind of prefer that the students be studying the science part of environmental science, or learning to read by reading about gardens.
September 29, 2011 at 1:44 pm | by JennIt is baffling to me how Jan Wong can link horticultural programs and low standardized test scores.
“The Grade 3 curriculum includes a section on plants and soils. Meanwhile, almost half of these third-graders failed to meet the provincial standard in 2010 in reading, writing and math. Nearly two thirds of the 380 students at Winchester speak a language other than English at home, and many of them are on a breakfast program. Clearly, these are among our most vulnerable students.”
How is it that you point fingers to a well-rounded curriculum that encourages exploration and holistic learning rather than to an inherently Euro-centric standardized test? Perhaps low test scores are not to blame on the students or school programs, but on the TEST itself – a test implemented by a notoriously anti-public education Mike Harris government; a government whose education minister, John Snobelen, never graduated from high school…
Over and over research on education shows the failure of standardized tests to produce real learning outcomes. Perhaps we should stop pointing fingers at community groups and school programs, and start asking some serious questions to the government and the ministry.
September 29, 2011 at 3:08 pm | by awHow on earth did you connect these dots, Jan?
October 3, 2011 at 6:46 pm | by Karen SloanGardening leads to poor reading skills? Where on earth did you come up with this pointless theory?
Here in Canada, we don’t ship our children to the country and abandon them on farms. It’s just a small part of their curriculum which I happen to think not only encourages better social skills, but blends many of the subjects they learn in school today, such as math, science, and yes, the arts. You could even add physical education to that. Plus, gardening is good for the soul.
Perhaps Ms. Wong has some childhood angst that she needs to work on in private, instead of here, in this fear mongering article that has no basis in reality.
Ms. Wong writings was a shock to me. How can any intelligent person write such baloney. The students can’t read because they are gardeners??? Gardening can teach math, etc if it is do right. That is proven beyond any doubt.
October 3, 2011 at 7:32 pm | by ken hargesheimerI’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.
The myth of standardized educational performance is perpetuated by a mind set which believes that all students will perform in set and predictable ways when given a directive to do so. It also perpetuates the misconception that the education system should be able to “produce” a standardized level of performance from every student in its system. It is a mind set that views the educational process itself not as an ever evolving individual organic process but rather as a formulaic procedure that when properly executed, will in the end produce students that will be able to meet a set of “standardized” requirements. However standardization neglects to take into account that all students are individuals who will perform in their own way as dictated by their interest, life situations, various circumstances, and their individual desire to perform or not. In other words every student can be given goals to meet by some authority figure, however in the end, it is the individual student who will decide whether or not to meet these goals and no amount of persuasion or even punishment can change this simple fact.
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 their learning about and understanding their place in the natural world thru experience and not just books.
October 3, 2011 at 9:49 pm | by Cat DavisI say horray to all of the people who posted comments on this article because they all make very good points, unlike the article itself. I do not have a background in agriculture at all, unless you count getting all muddy in my grandfather’s garden at a young age. But now that I’m attending a university of life sciences, with a focus on agriculture, I am just now beginning to see how important it is. If it weren’t for agriculture, we wouldn’t have schools at all because written language was pretty much invented to pass on information about farming to future generations.
This article is nothing more than an opinion with a poorly laid-out arguement. Perhaps there is a correlation between low reading skills and the presence of a school garden, but I agree with other comments here that mention that parents also have to play a role in a child’s education, not just plopping them in front of a computer or a playstation so they stay out of the way while cooking dinner, for example.
Does Ms Wong know that we are heading towards 3 billion more people in the next 40-50 years? And that there are fewer and fewer farmers in the world? How are we supposed to feed our children then, especially if we know nothing about nature and growing our own food. These are questions that need to be answered in my lifetime, and if we can teach children the value of farming at a young age (I am not saying they should move out of the city and start a farm), maybe they will be able to support their diets with healthy, backyard-grown fruits and vegetables because they learned how to do it in school.
October 4, 2011 at 9:36 am | by J. SmolkaComparing Mao’s Cultural Revolution to gardening lessons in Canadian schools is almost a crime in itself. As others have already argued: there is not a shred of evidence of any correlation between the gardening and the test results. It is a common pitfall to think that results will improve if children spend more time in the school working on their subject matter. The evidence is, that less is often more. Children need to learn in many ways: physical activities, outdoor activities and arts not only have a value of their own, they support the development of a healthy, well functioning mind. International data show, that a 14 year Finnish child has spent 2000 hours less in school than a 14 year old Dutch child. Yet the Finnish children outperform the Dutch on the international Pisa ranking on reading. The main reason: Dutch children don’t enjoy reading (50% of the Dutch children never read anything for enjoyment, not even comics). Forcing children to work hard all day long on their subject matter in reading, math and science, in order to pass state tests will not only prove to be counterproductive, it also resembles more of the mindset behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution, than school gardening programs.
Jan Tishauser, The Netherlands.
October 5, 2011 at 3:43 am | by Jan TishauserMs. Wong,
Thank you for this article. Education in this area has become asinine. You will notice that none of the school programs slaughter pigs or pluck chickens. It is a caricature of an idealized vegan farmer. In short: it is a lie.
As for technical applications, this has been on the decline for some time in most schools. Trade schools are becoming less available, and most schools have shut down even the semblance of electrical or mechanical engineering, let alone higher math skills, basic home economics and finances.
Further, programs such as this, and other “social” indoctrination are taking place.
Unfortunately, many have taken the view that we can no longer let our children explore and grow, discovering new solutions, and becoming stronger citizens for it. Many have taken the view that this is a dying world, and we need to see less, shelter more, and limit ourselves, It appears that many wish to institutionalize children so they are more conformist to these adult issues as soon as possible.
I do not subscribe to that view. I am an optimist. Only 4% of the universe is known to human beings, and to limit ourselves in this manner is ludicrous. Let children explore, and learn. Let them finish tasks that they have undertaken. Let them have fun and learn. Let’s not through ourselves back centuries of fun and work.
Thanks.
October 5, 2011 at 8:56 am | by JtotheAWhat the F is wrong with you people. Especially Ms. Wong. Do you really thing having a garden stops children from reading? Do you think working in a garden doesn’t require math skills? And what are seeds and growing things, but SCIENCE? Geez, I’ve never heard of such narrow minded people in my life. Not only does gardening in the schools do all that, but the kids are learning teamwork, responsibility, data collection, social sciences re:native ways of planting, and nutrition all the while enriching the curriculum and having fun in the sun while doing it. Shame on all the naysayers. This should be supported and encouraged throughout the education system.
October 5, 2011 at 9:40 am | by LaurieFor the first time in many years, I recently purchased a copy of Toronto Life, thinking it would help me to get the pulse of our city. I do not regret spending the money, although the benefit was not what I expected. There was indeed some good journalism elsewhere in the issue (e.g.the profile of Tim Hudak). However, the real gem was the Wong article – I plan to keep it around for a while. WOW. Jan should have lunch with Rob Ford.
October 6, 2011 at 10:55 am | by Mark McAlister