On Buying Lowly Worm and Seeking Redemption

Most every school I visited last term had bought a worm farm and is the process of establishing a school garden.  You’d be surprised by how many NZ Curriculum key competencies are hiding in the worm mulch.

So many have chosen to purchase kitset worm farms rather than finding recycled materials and making their own farms that it made me wish I had invested in the kitset worm farm industry .... or at the very least written a counter resource ...something in the Boys Own Adventure genre ...  a Willard Price knockoff like  “How to wrestle a worm farm from the suburbs.”

Reading a link from Arts and Letters Daily suggests that all this worm farm purchasing is fuelled by a desire to bring students back from “feral” and “boorishly gulped” fast-food diet to the family meal,

Waters quoted from an essay by Francine du Plessix Grey about the film “Kids,” which portrays the sex-, drug-, and violence-crazed lives of a circle of New York teenagers. Du Plessix Grey writes of being haunted by the adolescents’ “feral” and “boorishly gulped” fast-food diet: “we may,” she suggests, “be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialization, the family meal.”Food for thought  

To extend Waters argument ...

 I could suggest that by implication the whole “lets buy a school worm farm thing” is also about bringing students back from those “feral” and “boorishly gulped” SMS (and those too easily searched by others ) Twittering exchanges to “civilising discourse” ...

Such an activity “is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilizing discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness.” These teenagers “are deprived of the main course of civilized life—the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions.” Food for thought  

So school worm farm purchases are an expression of a desire to return to conversations shared over food rather than conversations shared through a screen. 

There are a couple of things that trouble me with all this purchasing, (and the grant proposals required to apply for funds to do all the purchasing).  For as the “Food for Thought” article argues  

“Today’s children, are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things.” But schoolyard gardens, like the one she helped create at the middle school a few blocks from my home in Berkeley, “turn pop culture upside-down: they teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting—for the things that money can’t buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening—and school cooking and eating—learn ethics.”

If we are teaching children about sustainable lifestyles – all that “redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting—for the things that money can’t buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives.” then what does purchasing a kitset that arrives at the school trussed up like a humungous Richard Scarry Busy Town Christmas present teach them?  

Comments

[Cherrie]

That adults don't know how to lead "sane, health and sustainable lives" any more than they do?

That's quite a worthy lesson...

[Cherrie]

Also, how old are these children? REDEMPTION?!

[vicky]

Come and visit our worm farm anytime for a true authentic experience

[Julia]

Such an activity “is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilizing discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness.” These teenagers “are deprived of the main course of civilized life—the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions.”

[Artichoke]

Ha Cherrie,
Whilst trying to figure out the sense of REDEMPTION in the article at Dictionary.com

e.g. Are we gardening for forgiveness or absolution for past sins and/or protection from damnation or is it something else altogether ..?

Dictionary.com
1. an act of redeeming or the state of being redeemed.
2. deliverance; rescue.
3. Theology. deliverance from sin; salvation.
4. atonement for guilt.
5. repurchase, as of something sold.
6. paying off, as of a mortgage, bond, or note.
7. recovery by payment, as of something pledged.
8. conversion of paper money into specie.

I stumbled over Worm charming, worm grunting, and worm fiddling all of which seem to have been neglected in the planning for sustainability discussions I have been part of ... the whole idea of charming seems to help with the redemption thing ... so thanks