from “Cultivating Failure” in the January issue of The Atlantic.
Caitlin Flanagan might merely have used her Atlantic article to question the educational value of incorporating veggie gardens into the public school curriculum. But no. Alice Waters, renowned chef and leading proponent of the gardens, can’t just be misguided. What would be the fun in that? No, we need hyperbole, folks. Waters and the people of Berkeley, CA aren’t engaged in an ineffectual effort to improve the lives of middle-schoolers. They’re about “bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.”
How does this stuff get published?
Flanagan’s article might even be correct. But it’s sloppy as hell and totally facile, decrying Waters for her lack of data and then approvingly quoting a charter school CEO saying “If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That’s all that matters to me.”
Really? I’m all for Shakespeare. But where’s the data? Do students trained to giggle during the right parts of Measure For Measure automatically kick ass on the math sections of college-admissions tests? Maybe. But Flanagan doesn’t prove it to me. She just gives me polemic and contradictory anecdotes whose contradictions don’t seem to rattle her:
* She writes about her “volunteer job in a Los Angeles food bank, where the clients scoop as many candies out of the basket on my desk as I’ll let them have (if I didn’t set a limit, only the first person would get any) before glumly turning to the matter of filling out their food order form, which offers such basic and unexciting items as tuna, rice, and (yes) fresh fruits and vegetables, often including delicious oranges, pears, and peaches that people with fruit trees donate the day they’re picked.”
* On her field trip to the Superior Super Warehouse in Compton, Flanagan learns that poor people have access to healthy food: “The produce section—packed with large families, most of them Hispanic—was like a dreamscape of strange and wonderful offerings: tomatillos, giant mangoes, cactus leaves, bunches of beets with their leaves on, chayote squash, red yams, yucca root. An entire string section of chiles: serrano, Anaheim, green, red, yellow. All of it was dirt cheap, as were the bulk beans and rice. Small children stood beside shopping carts with the complacent, slightly dazed look of kids whose mothers are taking care of business.”
This begs a question: If the moms shopping, with kids in tow, at a Super Warehouse store seem to be “taking care of business,” is it possible that the moms are, literally, taking care of business? Maybe these moms are shopping for a family restaurant. Maybe they’re buying the fixings for a week of family meals. Maybe they’re nannies and the kids aren’t even their kids. Maybe even though the store is located in the birthplace of N.W.A., the customers do not live in Compton. Maybe they’re not even poor. We don’t know. There’s nothing in the article to suggest that Flanagan spoke with the families. Maybe she did. If so, she should tell readers about it.
No space? Well, ditch the “bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students” sentence. It’s a vicious sentence.
Viciousness is off-putting. It’s distracting. So much bluster leaves the impression that Flanagan really, really, really believes what she’s writing but hasn’t done the reporting to prove it. When I bought the Atlantic, I expected much better.
