School Gardens: Growing Ideal Children and Future Adults

Throughout history, the school garden has been promoted as a beneficial, nurturing site for children’s learning in, with, and about nature. Benefits to children involved in school garden learning include increased scientific knowledge, healthier eating habits, greater physical fitness, and higher academic scores. However, the school garden has also had many negative consequences for children throughout history. Historically, the school garden has been used to control, contain, correct, and exploit children for the benefit of adults under the guise of nature education. This analysis of historical texts written during 1890s–1920s at the height of the school garden movement revealed adult agendas to use the school garden as a means of control to save the innocent/evil child; create good, moral, future citizens; and recruit children to become present and future reliable producers of agricultural goods. These adult intentions for school children were masked within the discourses which espoused the mutually beneficial relationship between children and their school garden. The natural and seemingly obvious pairing of children and nature have provided the rationale for adults’ use of the garden to educate and to also create obedient child citizens and laborers to fulfill social and political needs at various points in time.