{"id":418,"date":"2024-12-03T21:07:13","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T02:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/?page_id=418"},"modified":"2024-12-07T20:07:47","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T01:07:47","slug":"literature-review","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/historical-geographies-student-projects\/historical-geographies-of-childhood-student-projects-2024\/us-school-garden-army-anna-h\/literature-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging into the US School Garden Army: Literature Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Home<\/a>| Introduction<\/a> | Literature Review<\/a> | Data Analysis<\/a> | Conclusion<\/a> | Sources<\/a><\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The US School Garden Army can be understood through an analysis of its drivers: the beliefs, trends, and related social movements that contributed to the creation of the USGA. The following authors explore these drivers in the USGA or other phenomena. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nationalism through Movement and Youth Organizations<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The USGA, which recruited students to be \u201csoldiers of the soil,\u201d can be viewed within the larger trend of instilling nationalistic social values in children through physical activity during the early twentieth century. Gagen explores this in \u201cMaking America flesh: physicality and nationhood in early twentieth-century physical education reform.\u201d Gagen argues that physical activities in playgrounds and other settings were seen as not just teaching nationalism through the use of imagery during public events (in the case of the USGA, badges and uniforms), but through the physical movement itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gagen describes one of the primary motives of the playground movement as \u201cthe desire to provide a facility through which immigrant children could be encouraged to reject their ethnic identity in favour of American rituals and civic participation\u201d (Gagen, 2004, pp 418). With increases in scientific knowledge, psychologists thought that by controlling the physical body, the mental or spiritual body could be controlled as well: this theory was called \u201cmuscular consciousness\u201d (Gagen, 2004). G. Stanley Hall, an influential child psychologist at the time, thought that the use of muscles sent signals to the brain to stimulate different phases of mental and social development, which is what playground reformers used as the basis of their work. While Gagen focuses on the playground movement, because this was contemporaneous to the USGA and both incorporated physical activities and were driven by similar motives, the same theories can be applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Reject their ethnic identity in favour of American rituals and civic participation\u201d – Gagen<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Gagen also describes how the playground movement was a reaction to the growing diagnosis of mental disorders like neurasthenia that were thought to be tied to urban life and endanger masculinity (Gagen, 2004). This connects to Hayden-Smith\u2019s analysis of one of the drivers of the USGA, urbanization, which will be further explained in the second section. Men\u2019s physical and mental strength was considered fundamental to American identity and civilization, as the pioneer ideal was still strong, and urban life was a threat to that. The playground movement and the USGA can both be seen as ways to improve children\u2019s physical strength, and therefore their American identity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The importance of engaging children in nationalism, as opposed to waiting until they were older, ties to not just Hall\u2019s theories of the stages of development, but also social ideas about children\u2019s rights and duties. In The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction<\/em>, Marten explains the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. While this was adopted after the US School Garden Army\u2019s time period, it can be seen as the product of a history of thought. It includes children\u2019s right to serve their communities, which is a strong concept in USGA materials and ties to nationalist ideas of patriotic duty (Marten, 2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“youth movements can offer a lens through which to view changing conceptions and understandings of where young people \u2018fit\u2019 in society\u201d – Mills<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The USGA wasn\u2019t the only youth organization that focused on developing children as ideal citizens. In \u201c\u2018An instruction in good citizenship\u2019: scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education,\u201d Mills explores the importance of non-school spaces in developing students as citizens (Mills, 2012). Mills highlights how “youth movements can offer a lens through which to view changing conceptions and understandings of where young people \u2018fit\u2019 in society\u201d (Mills, 2012, pp. 121). In terms of the USGA, it can be viewed as a representation of how that generation of children marked a shift from a rural to urban society and one increasingly publicly-engaged, as school attendance increased.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In both Britain with the scout movement and the US with the USGA, these formalized youth organizations came after public education started to increase in an effort, as Mills describes, to enhance or support that work to develop citizens (Mills, 2012). Like the USGA, the British scouting movement was shaped by war: the founder, Robert Baden-Powell, was inspired to create it when he served during the Boer war and witnessed children assisting soldiers (Mills, 2012). This demonstrates that the military, nationalistic undertones of the USGA are not an exception and relate to broader, international trends.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Drivers of Garden Movement: Demographic Change<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned during the discussion of nationalism and youth organizations, fears around declining American identity due to demographic changes likely played a role in the establishment of the USGA. In \u201c\u2018Soldiers of the Soil\u2019: The Work of the United States Garden Army during World War I,\u201d Hayden-Smith elaborates on this idea. Before the USGA, most agricultural programming for youth was based in rural areas (Hayden-Smith, 2007). However, with the shift towards an urban country, there was a need for establishing both increased food production and American, agrarian ideals (to increase nationalism) in cities. (Hayden-Smith, 2007) This is why the USGA focused on establishing companies in urban areas as a \u201csynthesis of urban and rural experience\u201d (Hayden-Smith, 2007, pp. 19).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of this demographic shift towards urban environments, there was also an increase in consumerism, which Hayden-Smith expresses as a contrast to the agrarian producer ethic (Hayden-Smith, 2007, pp 19). The USGA\u2019s curriculum, the first national school curriculum, worked to instill that \u201cproducer ethic.\u201d Interestingly, the commercial forces that seem to oppose the spirit of the USGA actually probably contributed to its popularity. In Children at Play: An American History<\/em>, Chudacoff describes how retailers created \u201cChildren\u2019s Day\u201d to encourage the purchase of \u201cproper\u201d toys and used child-saving rhetoric to promote the event, including describing the dangers of unsupervised time and encouraging participation in youth groups, which the USGA is (Chudacoff, 2007).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The USGA was not only about values. Hayden-Smith described how migration from rural areas also strained the agricultural labor supply, posing a special risk when paired with a weak harvest in 1916-1917 and the need for additional wartime food supplies (Hayden-Smith, 2007). This led to youth being \u201cviewed as vital to achieving the nation\u2019s goals and security during wartime\u201d and recruited with slogans like \u201c\u2018he who produces is a patriot\u2019\u201d (Hayden-Smith, 2007, pp. 20 and 21). This, when viewed with the \u201cna\u00efve and dependent\u201d portrayal of children in Chudacoff, exemplifies an interesting double standard in the way in which children were viewed in the context of the USGA (Chudacoff, 2007, pp 105). They were both protectors of the nation\u2019s food security and in need of moral protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Drivers of General Garden Movement: Education Movements <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While it has been demonstrated that the USGA was targeted at an urban and suburban audience, one of the movements that contributed to it, the Nature Study movement, focused on \u201cinstilling in young people a love for the earth\u201d to keep them living on farms (Trelstad, 1997, pp. 163). Unlike many science-focused movements at the time, like the playground movement, it focused on children\u2019s spiritual relationship with nature and the Christian god (Trelstad, 1997). Also, most Progressive movements, while valuing rural lifestyles, seemed to have been more focused on improving the city than keeping people from going there. However, as Trelstad describes, the Nature Study movement eventually started working on increasing nature connection for urban children, which contributed to the rise of school gardens (Trelstad, 1997). In fact, the very first school garden, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was sponsored by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. However, the Progressive movement was stronger, and its goals more strongly influenced school gardens by the start of the 20th century: citizen development over education. And yet, remnants of the education focus can be seen in the USGA, which, as Hayden-Smith described, established the first national curriculum, although it could be argued that the goals of the education had changed (Hayden-Smith, 2007).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Europe\u2019s advanced agricultural training threatened American market competitiveness” – Lawson<\/p>\n\n\n\n

School gardens were also an education tool promoted by John Dewey, a leading Progressive era educator, who \u201cproposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society\u201d (Kohlstedt, 2008, pp 58). Like with kindergarten, Progressive advocates in the US also followed the lead of European educators (Lawson, 2005). In some European countries, agricultural education was required. Since advocates thought that Europe was generally ahead of the US in terms of education, and because some thought \u201cEurope\u2019s advanced agricultural training threatened American market competitiveness,\u201d the rise of agricultural education in Europe drove the increase in the school gardening movement in the United States (Lawson, 2005, pp 53).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Home| Introduction | Literature Review | Data Analysis | Conclusion | Sources The US School Garden Army can be understood through an analysis of its drivers: the beliefs, trends, and related social movements that contributed to the creation of the USGA. The following authors explore these drivers in the USGA or other phenomena. Nationalism through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8969,"featured_media":0,"parent":336,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-418","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8969"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1880,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/418\/revisions\/1880"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/mcope-childhoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}