Raising Whole Children is Like Raising Good Food

Ableman makes a point when stating that many citizens of today’s world have little or no knowledge of how the food they eat was processed and what people are effected by this process.

He suggests that we have our junior high students learn how to grow their own food, make their own clothes, build a structure, cook, and do community service. Making their own clothes (spinning silkworm thread, weaving, making patterns, sewing, etc) seems to involve more time than we may have. It appears that his suggestions are preparing students for a world without high technology, and little global interaction.

However, he does make sense that what we feel are “essential learnings” must be integrated and interwoven into global issues. How our food is prepared and what risks are people exposed to in this preparation are issues to explore and integrate.

Many school in the elementary have “pea patches” where crops are grown, cultivated, and harvested. Exposing the students to these activites would be enriching to our students. Many of the activities that Abelman suggests could be covered in depth in afterschool clubs but the more global issues should be integrated into the “essential learnings”.

As a “new” school we still have much to discuss to ensure that we are moving toward creating a new vision to education yet ensuring to students, parents, and educators that we are preparing the students for successful experiences in not only universities but also for their future life!

I like his analogy that we are growing tomatoes to better fit in boxes than to taste and be nutritious. He’s got the context right too, everything changes every year. The climate of your 2nd period Science 8 class is different than the 3rd Period Science 8 class. That was one of the things that struck me most when I started teaching last year. Each class of 25-34 kids had such a different collective personality.

We’re going through these processes with kids, just like with food, where we have a goal – education (getting kids to pass tests, get into college, buy books, pay tuition, buy more books, pay tuition) This process keeps us really busy. And if anyone questions us about the purpose of it all it’s like… what? are you stupid, we’re educating kids, getting them into colleges so they can pay tuition and buy books… It’s all so commercial. And it seems like the best piece of proof I can think of that this is exactly what is going on is the fate of a “success story student.” Straight A’s in HS, and college, then they finish with a degree in Chemistry or Math or History. It can even be an honors degree. What kind of job is there out there for them? Education is more personal than that. It’s more about that end all goal that each person can have for themselves.

He says food doesn’t magically appear on a shelf. Just as kids won’t magically become productive citizens. But they could earn A’s.

I liked when he talked about introducing kids to soil. I worked on an urban garden last summer. It was so funny to watch the kids shoveling the soil every day, but shying away from it when we talked about soil in the classroom.

I think he was leading us the point that learning is a natural process. Kids will learn. They will take in the world around them. I think they have the natural ability to look up facts. This leaves me with the question of, “if learning is natural, what is the job of the teacher?”

I think Robert Fried answers it with passion. I think we’re supposed to excite the kids, get them interested in the material. Make it relevant and meaningful to their lives. Teachers build foundations and give direction to that natural process, just as a farmer does in his trade.

There is a disconnect between the commercialization of our system of education and the job in which we think it is fulfilling. The that brings us to a whole other discussion. How can we change the system without falling into that trap of starting something to reach a means that might get lost in the ends… part of this issue might lie in the ambiguity of the word “education.”

When schools start changing will there be continued criticism? It reminds me of when the national chain “Whole Foods” (which offers organic and other natural foods) finally made it’s way to Pittsburgh. It made the competition change their ways too, offering more variety of natural foods. People were generally happy to have a new place to shop, new organic food. However, shortly after the new stores began to open and the major competitors changed their ways I began to hear the local co-op shoppers complain “We’ve been doing this for years and no one cared.”

It seems like everything also become so political and even when we begin moving in the “right” direction there is always dissent.

I couldn’t agree more with the clever analogy! Packaged food products may taste good and look
attractive on the shelves of supermarkets, but they are usually tainted with artificial flavor,
preservatives, and other unhealthy substances.
Similary, students who are good at and ONLY good at taking standardized tests may have
appealing scores, but they’re missing out on so much more. Thus, schools shouldn’t merely be
assembly lines that create good test-takers, mass-producing “parrots of other men’s thinking.”
Rather, they should be greenhouses that nourish the growth of creative individuals, mobilizing
them to reach their own state of self-authorship. But how to accomplish that is, unfortunately,
the tricky part.

Abelman’s article continues a long tradition of literary oscillation between the agriculturalists and the urbanites. The first installment in this tradition was Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” written in about the 6th c. B.C., by a Greek man, Hesiod, who lived in the agricultural interior, Boetia, of ancient Greece. His brother had recently left the home country to move to the rapidly urbanizing seacoast of Greece where a new class of merchants, traders and small manufacturers was emerging. Hesiod criticized the move primarily because he felt that he morality and way of life of the urban setting was inferior to that of the agricultural setting. Plato continues this theme in his dialogue, “The Republic.” I share below the key passage in that dialogue as part of an except from my latest book of poetry, “Divergent Grain” (now available from amazon.com):

The passage below comes from a dialogue called “The Republic,” written by Plato about 2300 years ago. Socrates is talking with several people about justice. Among his interlocutors are Plato’s two brothers, Glaucon and Adimantus. They both want Socrates to describe and explain to them the meaning and nature of justice. Socrates claims that the easiest way to do it is to look at justice on a large scale, such as in a city or state. So, he gives the following account of a just state. “The Republic” is Plato’s most famous dialogue. However, in all the years that I have studied and taught and read philosophy, I have never heard anyone talk about this particular passage of “The Republic”.

The passage is extraordinary, I think, because it shows a human living condition, a state, without insecurity. Everything proceeds smoothly from birth to death. Besides there being no insecurity, there are also no myth, no philosophy, and no science. Religion appears only as polytheism and then briefly as an occasion to sing hymns to the gods. The healthy state requires no formal religious structures, processes, buildings or positions. Plato seems to have understood that the mental productions of human beings are directly related to, and directly compensate for, feelings of security and insecurity. It is also worth noting, in our age of addictions, that there are no apparent addictions in Socrates’ healthy state. Addiction thus appears, through the lens of this passage, as a compensatory reaction to chronic insecurity. In fact, Glaucon and Adimantus mock Socrates’ healthy state and press him to give an account of a more realistic condition. When Socrates does so, the remainder of the long dialogue unfolds under the description of “a state at fever-heat.” Plato contrasts healthy with feverish as we would now contrast healthy with addicted.

[Socrates] “And if we imagine the state in process of creation, we shall see the justice and injustice of the state in process of creation also.
[Adimantus] “I dare say.
[Socrates]“When the state is completed there may be a hope that the object of our search will be more easily discovered.
[Adimantus]“Yes, far more easily.
“But ought we to attempt to construct one? I [Socrates] said; for to do so, as I am inclined to think, will be a very serious task. Reflect therefore.
“I have reflected, said Adimantus, and am anxious that you should proceed.
“A state, I said, arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of humankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a state be imagined?
“There can be no other.
“Then, as we have many wants, and many persons are needed to supply them, one takes a helper for one purpose and another for another; and when these partners and helpers are gathered together in one habitation the body of inhabitants is termed a state.
“True, he said.
“And they exchange with one another, and one gives, and another receives, under the idea that the exchange will be for their good.
“Very true.
“Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a state; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.
“Of course, he replied.
“Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.
“Certainly.
“The second is dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.
“True.
“And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one person is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?
“Quite right.
“The barest notion of a state must include four or five persons.
“Clearly.
“And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his or her labors into a common stock?—the individual husbandman, for example, producing four, laboring four times as long and as much as he need in the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three-fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying all his own wants?
“Adimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at producing everything.
“Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you say this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.
“Very true.
“And will you have a work better done when the workman has many occupations, or when he has only one?
“When he has only one.
“Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at the right time?
“No doubt.
“For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is at leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the business his first object.
“He must.
“And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.
“Undoubtedly.
“Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will not make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture, if they are to be good for anything. Neither will the builder make his tools—and he needs too many; and in like manner the weaver and shoemaker.
“True.
“Then carpenters, and smiths, and many other artisans, will be sharers in our little state, which is already beginning to grow?
“True.
“Yet even if we add neatherds, shepherds, and other herdsmen, in order that our husbandmen may have oxen to plough with, and builders as well as husbandmen may have draught cattle, and curriers and weavers fleeces and hides,—still our state will not be very large.
“That is true; yet neither will it be a very small state which contains all these.
“Then, again, there is the situation of the city—to find a place where nothing need be imported is wellnigh impossible.
“Impossible.
“Then there must be another class of citizens who will bring the required supply from another city?
“There must.
“But if the trader goes empty-handed, having nothing which they require who would supply his need, he will come back empty-handed.
“That is certain.
“And therefore what they produce at home must be not only enough for themselves, but such both in quantity and quality as to accommodate those from whom their wants are supplied.
“Very true.
“Then more husbandmen and more artisans will be required?
“They will.
“Not to mention the importers and exporters, who are called merchants?
“Yes.
“Then we shall want merchants?
“We shall.
“And if merchandise is to be carried over the sea, skillful sailors will also be needed, and in considerable numbers?
“Yes, in considerable numbers.
“Then, again, within the city, how will they exchange their productions? To secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our principal objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a state.
“Clearly they will buy and sell.
“Then they will need a market-place, and a money-token for purposes of exchange.
“Certainly.
“Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him,—is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?
“Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who desire to buy.
“This want, then, creates a class of retail-traders in our state. Is not ‘retailer’ the term which is applied to those who sit in the market-place engaged in buying and selling, while those who wander from one city to another city are called merchants?
“Yes, he said.
“And there is another class of servants, who are intellectually hardly on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily strength for labor, which accordingly they sell, and are called, if I do not mistake, hirelings, hire being the name which is given to the price of their labor.
“True.
“Then hirelings will help make up our population?
“Yes.
“And now, Adimantus, is our state matured and perfected?
“I think so.
“Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the state did they spring up?
“Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another. I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found anywhere else.
“I dare say you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better think the matter out, and not shrink from the inquiry.
“Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
“But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.
“True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish—salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.
“Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
“But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
“Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.
“Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a state, but how a luxurious state is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a state we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the state is the one which I have described. But if you wish to see a state at fever-heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
“True, he said.
“Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy state is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colors; another will be the votaries of music—poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women’s dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our state, but are needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.
“Certainly.
“And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?
“Much greater.
“And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?
“Quite true.
“Then a slice of our neighbors’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
“That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
“And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?
“Most certainly.
“Then, without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much may we affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also causes of almost all the evils in states, private as well as public.
“Undoubtedly.
“And our state must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will be nothing short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons whom we were describing above.” (Based on, “The Republic,” Book II, The Dialogues of Plato, Translated into English by B. Jowett, M.A., Random House, New York; Volume One, pp. 632-37)

After Plato, the increasing diversity of living ways in the Hellenistic period brought forth Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism, all of which counseled simplifications of life around an individual’s power to control his or her own well-being, happiness and destiny. Similar messages came from teachers across the Indoeuropean landmass, including Buddha, Christ and Mohammed. By the 10th c. AD, these religious teachings had partially crystallized into the monastic traditions that allowed individuals, both male and female, to leave the life of towns and cities and retire permanently into relatively self-contained, agriculturally based communities. The monasteries were largely self-sufficient, growing their own food, keeping their own animals and often making their own tools.

In the modern period, the secularized oscillation between agriculturalists and urbanites gave birth to Romanticism as a cultural movement, again articulated primarily in literature, that opposed a natural life oriented around individual choice, aspiration and well-being, to an urbanized life oriented around mass processes. Many individuals experimented with alternate living arrangements in communes and divergent communities from the 17th c onwards in both Europe and American. By the 19th c., and motivated in no small measure by the fame of Rousseau’s novel of Romantic education, “Emile,” Romanticism in education appeared in the work of Pestalozzi and Montessori. In the 20th c., the oscillation continued with John Dewey and B.F. Skinner as two of its major representatives.

Not often noted but necessary to complete the picture of the oscillation is that the voices of hunters and gathers have never been represented clearly or systematically in this tradition. Why? Because they did not express themselves in written language. By the time of Hesiod in Greece, the older foraging, nomadic cultures that had occupied southern Europe were long ago marginalized and silenced. Hesiod, Plato and other authors inaugurated a tradition of verbal argumentation that became increasingly closed to those who expressed themselves through spoken, sung or chanted language and who did not create stable physical institutions legitimated by written texts. Actually, there always have been three voices or parts to this symphony; the third voice can only be heard, though, once the rustling of pages and clicking of keys has stopped.

Abelman continues the oscillation is terms reminiscent of the entire tradition. It does seem a somewhat ironic offering from you, Brent, considering that you are starting a new school in a community fueled largely by the income from one of the largest and most successful standardization processes in the world: the manufacture of silicon chips. : ) David