Ball publishing sponsored a survey to try to understand the changing gardening market.
This is really interesting!
At the school I work at I teach personalised learning (maths and science). That means I develop individual curriculums for individual kids based on the National Curriculum framework I am bound to. The basis of this is that to get the most out of the kids we should be targetting what they are good at and interested in and a one-size-fits-all approach just does not work (yet kids will learn despite our best efforts to dull their senses with the same old crap we’ve always taught). One of the things I do with kids to help me understand them a little better is a multiple intelligences (proposed interestingly enough be a man whose last name was Gardener lol), survey… to start to see what makes them tick. When I do these tests I come up very strongly in naturalisitic intelligence and a lot of what I do and am interested in is derived from this side of my psyche. Over the years I have noticed a dramatic decline in the number of kids who are strong in this area. They are aware of environmental issues and they have a concern about them at some level but as far as feeling connected with nature in any deep and nurturing way many of them just don’t associate with it. This is probably different from area to area but in NW of Tasmania that’s the demographic of kids coming through the system. Many kids are coming up strong in logical mathematical intelligence, muscial intelligence, and interpersonal intelligence. Of course multiple intelligences are only part of the big picture but I find it a useful tool to use.
I have a (simplistic) theory about why this is becoming a dominant pattern too. People who are strong in the naturalistic side of intelligence are conscious of their impact on the planet and so have fewer children. There is evidence to suggest that the particular type of intelligence is an inheritable trait and so if naturalistically intelligent people are having fewer children then the proportion of naturalistically intelligent people will be low. These are the ones that are going to be interested in gardening and see the intrinsic value in it. When people’s actual survival relied on their ability to survive on what the land provided for them naturalistic intelligence was selected for in human populations… now… not so much. You can’t force someone to develop intelligences in other areas, I believe, as these are the ways in which our brains are hard-wired.
The trick, from a gardening industry point of view, is similar to the trick from an education point of view. How do you take something like a National Curriculum and convince someone that it is a good idea to learn about algebra if all they want to do is play music or dance? There needs to be effort made by those in the garden industry to think of ‘angles’ to use to try and work with multiple intelligences instead of from one side only… the gardening side.
Very interesting indeed (to me LOL).