Should children learn gardening at school?

Dawn Isaac is going to lead the way this week with a guest blog on a subject that I cannot ever make my mind up on.

Should children be taught gardening while they are still at school?

If you would like to have your say after reading the piece then feel free to leave a comment in the form below.

Are the RHS leading kids up the garden path?

An event occurred last week, as rare as hen's teeth. I left the house without a single child in tow and enjoyed a night out in London. It was the first ever alumni dinner for the English Gardening School but to be honest, it could have been a meeting of Composters United - South East Division and I would still have leapt at the chance to put on a dress and talk to grown ups.

One very charming grown up I met was James Alexander Sinclair - a speaker at the event. We were chatting afterwards, and as always, I brought up the topic of gardening and children. We spoke about the RHS' drive to develop gardening in schools and he put forward an interesting argument for this being a misdirected move.

It was not the idea, per se, he objected to, but that with finite resources, this venerable gardening institution would do better to target 20-somethings who actually may have their own garden, but be clueless as to how to tackle it.

Of couse, I disagreed - I think it's in my genetic code to always take the counter argument. But the more thought I give it, the more sense it makes. Children, especially in schools, are a captive audience and far easier to direct energy towards. Which institution would deliver an equivalent audience of 20-somethings? The gym? The supermarket? The pub?

Also the phrase 'give me the child till he's seven and I'll give you the man', whilst an overstatement in my book, has at least an element of truth. Certainly I think by our 20s we're pretty much hard-wired, whereas primary age school children are able to absorb and retain enormous amounts of new information.

I'm not suggesting for a minute, that they will have instant recall on how to grow tomatoes in 10 or 20 years' time, but it won't be an entirely alien concept either. And, so long as it's once been part of their 'comfort zone' (forgive the management speak - years of corporate PR have taken their toll) they won't baulk at revisiting the idea.

Finally, you only have to ask any keen gardener for their earliest horticultural memories to see the importance of our formative years. So, in my book, the RHS are on the right track.

One thing, however, Mr Alexander-Sinclair and I did agree on. Teenagers and gardening - forget it!