When I was a kid, there was school and there was yard work. School, I was always told, was my job. Yard work, meanwhile, was an involuntary obligation imposed on me by my father, who every Saturday morning could be found pruning hedges, pulling weeds, and planting vegetables in the terraced gardens he built in the backyard. It was hot, difficult, hellish work.

But I obviously grew up in a house that had a yard, and now that I live in New York City, I think back often on those halcyon days of sweaty, back-breaking, dirt-smudged labor with great yearning. Oh, to spread mulch again. What could be better?

In cities across the country, gardening is finding its way into school curricula, and for the most part it's been lauded for teaching kids about healthy foods and where they come from. Indeed, this explosion in green thumb education is largely due to Michelle Obama's efforts to change the way American children eat through educational initiatives and, of course, her own organic garden on the White House lawn.

But at least one person argues that for many first-generation Americans, whose parents made great sacrifices to raise their children in a country where they wouldn't have to break their backs in menial agricultural jobs, such a curriculum is tantamount to a life sentence of hard labor.

In her review for the Atlantic of Thomas McNamee's new biography of Alice Waters, the famed owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and a champion of teaching kids about gardening in school, Caitlin Flanagan points out that the California school system is largely failing despite the flourishing gardening programs they offer.

And this, she suggests, will only reinforce the American version of a caste system. In other words, guess what happens when the state's hispanic students graduate from high school, practically illiterate, with only one skill set? Agriculture.

Flanagan's argument has some merit, but I wonder if it might lose steam the further from California you go. In New York, immigrants don't tend to work in agriculture; they drive cabs and work in restaurants, issue driver's licenses and clean buildings. For their kids to learn a thing or two about real food and where it comes from surely won't condemn them to lives of zero opportunity. It might simply teach them, and their classmates, that Cheetos and Gummi Bears aren't food at all.

[Image: NYTimes.com]