I see CSA as a two-way street. It is far more difficult to be ignorant of the circumstances that farmers and their families face when you see them and talk to them most every week to pick up the food you are going to feed to your family and yourself.
Getting people back in touch with the farm through a variety of strategies is my life's work, so I fully support what you are saying here.
I know that's an ideal, that does not play out in every circumstances. But to this outside observer (I have belonged to two CSAs over the years, and may soon belong to another -- long story), most often the education does happen: consumers learn from the farmers, and the farmers learn from the consumers -- with predictable ups and downs and ins and outs.
I remember back 35 years ago talking to one of the pioneers in organic farming, and he said something to me half in jest that I think still applies. He said that he was finding that it was vastly easier to turn a farmer into a hippy than to turn a hippy into a farmer. Most small family farmers have long since been turned into "hippies" - that is to say that progressive agriculture - so called "conventional" by those removed from and ignorant about farming - has moved way beyond the original organic paradigm, while organic adherents are still stuck back in the thinking from the 60's and the movement has become an ideological and political movement rather than an agricultural movement and is becoming more and more divorced from the realities of farming.
Organic in fruit growing today still represents a fraction of 1% of the food needs of the public,. It is 99% hype and advocacy and about 1% about feeding anyone. The practices are also more hazardous and less sustainable than what the real growers are doing, since “organic” has come to mean “natural” - which is to say that it means nothing. Approved chemicals for organic are more toxic and harder on the soil and require much more spraying than real growers would ever use. Also, the consumer demand for organic has merely led to a tidal wave of un-inspected imports being labeled “organic’ - most organic produce in the supermarket is grown outside of the US and beyond the effective purview of the USDA —where getting “organic certification” is a matter of bribing a few local officials, and the organic trade is now completely dominated by large corporations. Modern organic fails at feeding the people, fails at strengthening agricultural communities, fails at being sustainable, fails at overcoming corporate domination of our food supply, and fails at producing safer food.
We have a neighbor who has been dedicated to running a CSA for decades now, and probably an exceptional example of the model. After over 25 years they are still reliant on grants and donations and have not expanded the number of people they reach much at all. They do a nice job at what they do. But they are surrounded by 300 small family farms, and the one I worked at last received a thousand times as many visitors to tour the farm and see how a real farm works than the CSA operation gets. Those 300 family farms in the county are making a living at farming, are very progressive and sustainable in their practices, and are helping to feed Chicago. If we take making a living out of farming and sustaining the community of 300 family farms and feeding Chicago out of the picture, then we really are not talking about farming anymore, but about hobby gardening and a leisure time activity for a select few.
Therefore the notion that CSA is the only, or even a good way to educate the public about agriculture is of limited value.
I agree that large-scale ag is needed also. No argument. Absolutely. But large-scale ag need not rape, pollute, mutate and otherwise degenerate the essential capital of fertile soil, water supply, and healthy seed stock -- not to even begin getting into industrial-scale corporate feed lots for meat, etc. Yuckapoo.
What we are talking about here is not large versus small, rather it is about absentee owner corporate agri-business farming versus family farming within traditional cooperative agricultural communities. In deciduous fruit growing, 300 acres give or take seems about ideal for family management, and it is when 10,000 acres are managed plantation style, with corporate ownership and the inevitable complete lack of responsibility to anyone but Wall Street and shareholders that involves that causes all of the problems. The tail is wagging the dog in agriculture. The corporations are too big and too powerful, and are steamrolling traditional cooperative agricultural communities around the world out of existence in the pursuit of total domination and exploitation of both resources and labor.