The Fruitful Ground, The Quiet Mind
Pushing students toward a unified sense of self.
One of my favorite poems is a short, reflective lyric by the sixteenth-century English poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey called “The Things That Cause a Quiet Life.” Its first stanza is especially good:
My friend, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;
The lines about inherited wealth don’t apply to my personal experience and therefore haven’t exactly become words to live by. Instead, it’s the last line that repeats itself endlessly in my mind when I’m working in the garden or talking to students about the landscape around our campus: “The fruitful ground; the quiet mind.”
Last week, as I asked you to spread the word about this newsletter in order to help our program grow, I mentioned some questions I’m often asked about The Classical Roots Program, and then proposed a better set of questions. That list of better questions could extend endlessly, but among the most important of them is “What does an in-school gardening program teach students that nothing else can?” In classical education, we learn that one of the secrets to wisdom is the ability not just to distinguish the bad from the good, but to judge between what is good and what is best. I think almost anyone could agree that an in-school gardening program that involves itself in the curriculum is a good thing. But is it the best thing? Does it answer a clear and obvious educational need, and is it the best possible answer to that need?
All parents and educators are aware of the mental health crisis that is gathering speed and force in the generation below us. A 2016 article in Time Magazine put it well, arguing that the post-9/11 generation has been “…raised in an era of economic and national insecurity. They’ve never known a time when terrorism and school shootings weren’t the norm. They grew up watching their parents weather a severe recession, and, perhaps most important, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society.”
As sobering as I find this summary of the situation, it’s even more striking to realize that it was written before the pandemic, a turn of events that, at least from my perspective, enlarged this crisis by an order of magnitude.
Many of my students—and their parents too—have turned to online communities as a source of comfort, control, and identity during these unstable times. We’re now reaping the harvest of those digital seeds. Hungry for distraction and eager to discover a sense of self, many modern teenagers have unintentionally located their core identities in the digital world. The consequences of this shift of their identities into a digital space are measurable, well-documented, and severe. As editor David Buckingham writes in his introduction to MIT’s 2008 study Youth, Identity, and Social Media, digital media are associated with “…a whole litany of social ills—addiction, antisocial behavior, obesity, educational underachievement, commercial exploitation, stunted imaginations . . . and the list goes on.” Meanwhile, Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the effects that reading has on the brain, has pretty definitively proved that, if we learn to read only in a digital format, the part of our brain that is associated with empathy goes unstimulated, resulting in a measurably less compassionate adult mind.
Little of this is news, and it’s also unlikely that you subscribed to this newsletter about gardening to be confronted with dire summaries of the teenage mental health crisis. I bring it all up not to frighten anyone or to paint an unhopeful picture of the future, but to highlight one simple fact: whatever school is to be in the modern world, it must involve answers to this crisis if it’s to remain a relevant aspect of a young person’s development. And we’d be fools if, in response to this urgency, we tried to mimic the strategies that social media companies use to draw young people in; to attempt to be flashy, trendy, digitally savvy or, worst of all, “cool.”
A wise school program can instead offer an alternative: it can nudge students towards a unified sense of self. It can surround them with quiet, offer spaces and times for contemplation, teach timeless and challenging texts, foster depth of knowledge over breadth, and favor experiential models of learning. And it is when we consider such positive alternatives that a garden starts to look like one of the best educational tools available to us.
I don’t need to consult studies published at MIT to find evidence that gardens are great educational tools: I’ve been knee-deep in the evidence for the last few years. In an article two years ago, I mentioned a recent biological study which proved that the microorganisms in the soil create a sense of wholeness and relaxation in our minds when our skin comes in contact with them. So there is a real, verifiable difference in the mental health of those who garden.
But there is also anecdotal evidence aplenty: students of mine who spend their lunch hours sitting quietly in the orchard or the vegetable garden, second-graders who come home from one of our classroom visits and demand that their parents start composting, families that change vacation plans to guarantee a slot in our summer volunteer program, parents who stray from their idling cars at pick-up time to poke around the gravel paths and smell the rosemary. All of these apparently inconsequential moments are actually quiet signals that the garden is answering a need, a fully educational need whose answer should be fully embraced by our places of education.
The Classical Roots Program’s green spaces are not gardens that happen to be at a school. They are classrooms, in the most robust sense of that term. These gardens call to the students not because they distract them from school but because they fill a widening gap in their schooling. To work the earth is to become grounded in every sense: those who spend time cultivating growing things are, almost by accident, also cultivating themselves.
In the agricultural past, it used to be that school was the place students came to encounter society, to catch a glimpse of the wide world. These days, the wide world inundates a young person’s experience at every hour of the day. It’s constantly pushing its way under the door, through the windows, and between the open tabs into their minds, bringing all its attendant noise and anxieties with it. What should schools become during such an era?
One possible answer is that they should become what the fields and hedgerows used to be in a young person’s life: places of quietude, even solitude, of uncrowded and reflective hours, and of intimate connection with the natural world. Such a connection is no longer something we can take for granted in a young person’s upbringing, yet it’s an essential aspect of the human experience. We cannot understand our literature, our history, or even ourselves if we lose that connection, vanishing into the kaleidoscopic maelstrom of a purely digital identity. Forget the ingredients of success, a real school needs to offer its students the ingredients of wholeness: the fruitful ground, the quiet mind. What better place to gather such ingredients than in a garden?
