I’ve long been an advocate of returning home economic classes to public schools. Woodworking, cooking, parenting, and home financing classes are GOOD things. Unless you plan on winning the lottery, you’re going to need to know how to make pasta dinner for four at some point. You will have to do some basic home maintenance. You’re going to have to pay a credit card bill. These classes used to be part of the public school curriculum and were phased out in the 1980s in favor of academic electives.
In the New Republic, Rebecca Traister argues that we should reinstate home ec classes into the public school curriculum, because men need to learn these jobs, too. Women and girls pick these skills on their own, because it is expected of them. But boys could use some direct instruction in these areas. If they appreciated the value of these jobs, they might be better advocates for child care and leave policies. Besides, with the shift in the economy, more guys might end up as the full time parents.
I whole-heartedly agreed with Traister. Housework is a skill that needs to be honed by men, as well as women. I think it’s valuable work. I think that we need public policies that enable famiies to maintain their work and family responsibilities.
But I also think that we need more home ec classes, because working with your hands is deeply rewarding. I enjoy cooking food. I enjoy digging up my lawn to create a garden. I got an A+ in my shop class in middle school, because I was an excellent sander. Maybe the best way to get more men to do housework is to de-politicize it.
It’s funny, but I think that the bearded hipsters have done a lot for our cause. At least in terms of food, they have made cooking a manly job.
Apt. 11d 
There are a lot of reasons for the decline of such courses. First of all, in UMC communities, they don’t help with college admissions. There is an immense amount of material that needs to be crammed into HS kids if they are going to ace the various exams. Even in my day (’76), our math teacher frequently said, “Interesting question, but it isn’t on the BC syllabus, so we aren’t going to do it.” That problem has only gotten worse.
Second, if the courses are made optional, all the boys will end up in shop, and all the girls in cooking (regardless of their autonomous preferences, because being normal IS most teenagers’ autonomous preference). I think the schools want to avoid such a situation. Notwithstanding that a large number of UMC women are SAHMs, they are very committed to breaking down traditional gender roles.
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I agree that college admissions is altering the learning landscape for UMC families quite thoroughly, reaching deeper and deeper into their lives and schools and earlier and earlier into school and that this is a prime reason why classes like “home ec” are going away. Those classes, even if they’re useful, don’t allow students to differentiate themselves, or, if they do (“excellent sander”) not in ways that help with college admissions. The classes that now remain because they are a means for students to differentiate themselves from their competitors are advantaged compared to those that try to teach everyone a necessary skill. I wish this would change, but I don’t see any path to it (though if we can change the culture of cigarettes, homophobia, and eventually guns, we should be able to change this too).
I also think there’s the more difficult question that as society becomes more complicated and advanced and global that there’s just more to learn, from fields/topics that didn’t exist when we were in school — computer science, neuroscience, molecular biology, world health, . . . to the need to know more about the history of our entire world. Can we really just keep adding without taking anything away? And, if we take away, what goes?
My kiddo just did a science lab using DNA analysis to identify two different kinds of fish. The class used a PCR reaction to amplify the DNA so that they could check the right pieces of DNA for the difference. I realized that I’ve never actually used that technique, though I am a biologist. We looked up the PCR reaction and realized that it was invented right around the time I was earning my degree. It’s now an “indispensable technique” that is being taught in 7th grade science. Do they have time to learn that and how to cook pasta (or make waldorf salad, like I did, in my home ec class)? Does she need to know PCR more than making waldorf salad? Can one be taught better in school than the other? Does learning one help you with the other (much of molecular biology can be following recipes, like cooking)?
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Our kids’ private school doesn’t really have any room in the curriculum for non-academic stuff, so that’s one of the things I need the summer for. This summer, for instance, our rising 7th grader will be doing a cooking class (she did one last summer, too–loved it). She’s been doing a fair amount of basic cooking projects over the past year. If I can scrape up the money, both kids will do another machine sewing class. At some point, I’m going to drag them to a Dave Ramsey live event (the Total Money Makeover one if it’s still being offered) and have them do Financial Peace University (a 9-week class that meets weekly that I expect to facilitate one of these years). The rising 7th grader will hopefully also do a YMCA one-day babysitting training course (I’ve got her first mother’s helper gig of the summer lined up already). Knitting and cake decorating are also options, but those are frills and I expect my summer funds to have run out well before then, because we aren’t just doing home ec, but it’s definitely one of the gaps we need to take care of.
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In our UMC school district, everyone has to take ‘Tech’, which is basically shop. Makes sense to me: most kids can learn how to cook at home, and most people have basic cooking equipment at home, but fewer have lathes and building tools.
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Google works. If it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for them.
Youtube has thousands or millions of videos with practical pointers on how to keep house. I recently learned how to fold a fitted sheet from Youtube. I’ve cleaned and repaired things with Youtube’s help. My cousin doesn’t use cookbooks anymore. She just searches online cooking researches.
A real home ec curriculum would require home ec teachers, and equipment–ovens, cooktops, sewing machines, woodshop (if you stretch the definition), probably an included child care demonstration center. All of which would have to be provided a space ($), insured ($$), and staffed ($$$).
Let’s teach kids to fish by teaching them how to find the skills they need on demand on the world wide web. Use the money otherwise devoted to home ec to teachers of academic subjects, which for me include theater, the fine arts, and music.
Both my older children learned carpentry skills building sets for school shows. I would rather a high school support a theater department than a home ec department.
The author wrote: The addition of home economics to a grade-school curriculum could help these boys, particularly if that curriculum also included an element of interpersonal, emotional education that taught them how to express affection and disagreement and how to ask questions and speak up for themselves. Boys are still too often made to feel as if they should communicate dissatisfaction not with words but through physical aggression.
Argh. No to the home ec curriculum as a stealth way to feminize boys. Just no. Let’s masculinize girls, teachers, and schools. Let’s start robotics leagues, young architects’ clubs, kiddie theaters and math leagues in elementary schools instead of sewing leagues. And let all children enjoy the benefits of vigorous physical exercise daily.
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I don’t want to masculinze girls, and think that the talents of doing effective work in all of these domains are transferable among each other. Cooking really is like molecular biology (or the other way around). Sewing and other fine motor skills are highly related to the work required in soldering, electrophysiology, surgery, . . . .
“Feminine” skills, like organizing groups of people to work together (not as a boss who has absolute authority, but as a manager who has to get buy-in) is extremely important in the current corporate work place.
Some kids like working with fabrics and thread rather than legos and wires and the learning that comes from that is applicable in a variety of different tasks that they might chose to do later. CAD skills can be acquired designing materials and clothes as well as designing houses. Computer skills by working with Photoshop and programming skills by learning animation (as well as by playing minecraft or programming a robot). Sewing machines these days can be programmed — and following a pattern, quilting, and designing can encourage and teach significant skills, from geometry, to spatial learning, to sequencing. Dismissing sewing clubs as being outdated is naive, and rejects an opportunity to teach skills through interests.
I am a technically oriented woman (and have been all my life) and one on-going discussion I have with my daughter is to think about substance and not surface. I’m not going to argue that some activities aren’t more important, more creative, deeper than others, but I always fight against the notion that this can be deduced from the population the activity is usually associated with.
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bj: Would you sacrifice the PCR equipment, and the teacher who can lead a lab on the technique, for sewing class? No budget has room for all the activities that might be useful.
Our local high school did away with shop more than a decade ago. They wanted the space for classrooms, and had the theory that the mechanically inclined students would choose to attend the region’s voc/tech school. That didn’t happen, in part because the local school systems encourage the more academic kids to stay in their home systems. The need young (future) engineers have for hands-on soldering and such has been met through robotics club.
I don’t think the school should have dropped shop. Nevertheless, I would not have argued for its continuation on something like, “young women need to learn how to behave more like mechanically-inclined young men. Requiring them to use table saws and routers will develop skills of action, physical project planning, and the ability to make coat racks.” Traister argues for home ec for all students by adding “social and emotional” components it doesn’t possess.
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We have a sewing club at our school. My kiddo hated sewing, but there are others, including an extraordinary singer and an extraordinary athlete who loved it. I wouldn’t be at all opposed to a sewing unit being included in a class (probably art class, not science, though with the right twist, it could be a tech class) just as the PCR class was. I also think that sewing could be used for as much associated learning as the PCR unit.
(and, you can learn how to do PCR from you tube videos, too. Oh, and look, a build it yourself personal PCR machine: http://openpcr.org/.)
I agree with the general principle that we need to be teaching the kids how to acquire the skills they will need in an ever changing world but I think that teaching those skills can come through a variety of means, and, practically, more people might benefit from learning how to cook pasta, as the method of learning the skill, than doing PCR (just so that they could say they’d done it). Cooking pasta could easily be incorporated into a scientific unit that taught just as much chemistry (though less about DNA) as the PCR unit.
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bj said:
“I agree with the general principle that we need to be teaching the kids how to acquire the skills they will need in an ever changing world but I think that teaching those skills can come through a variety of means, and, practically, more people might benefit from learning how to cook pasta, as the method of learning the skill, than doing PCR (just so that they could say they’d done it).”
I believe in teaching kids a lot of different stuff. The more you know, the more you’ll be able to learn–there’s definitely a snowballing effect. The one batch of cornbread turns into the confidence to cook half a dozen different things, very rapidly, but you need to have that first batch of cornbread.
Here’s our rising 7th grader’s choice of short courses for the local “gifted” program: computer game design, logic, sculpture, robotics, ancient weapons and cooking (yeah, I know–gifted cooking). I have a lot more ideas for the summer, but I expect our funds will run out before I run out of ideas.
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I don’t think there’s any contradiction between a robotics league and a sewing league.
My oldest has showed a lot of aptitude at both. We got her a used German-made sewing machine last summer and, as my husband observed, that sewing machine is the most complex piece of machinery in our home (and he’s a guy who loves his machinery).
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I took both home ec and shop in the 1970s. How many people will *ever* own a home shop versus the number that will have a kitchen and need to sew a button?
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Chef has long been a ‘man’s job’ and it has been very difficult for women to break in, so I’m not sure that hipsters have made cooking a man’s job or manly. They have helped with cooking at home. Although, my father was the main cook at home and none of my friends ever thought that odd. Cooking as woman’s work is one of those things that I’ve always thought was more about the myth than reality.
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I have come to the conclusion that cooking is the job of those who want to eat. The kids do add a twist to that, since you do have to feed them.
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Sure, but I think it has always been that way and that the notion that women are the ones actually doing the cooking is not necessarily reality. My father was the cook, my grad advisor was the cook in his home (and his wife didn’t work), my ex’s father did most of the cooking etc. Yes that is anecdotal, but I have encountered it enough to think that cooking=woman’s work was never really the case.
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We basically just instituted shop again. We transformed our “tech” classes from k-8th grade into “maker” classes where kids learn electronics, programming, 3D printing, woodworking, lasercutting, building of all kinds. It has a STEM focus, but also includes an emphasis on creativity and art in many projects. Since we’re all girls here, we felt this kind of hands-on work with tools was important. We also have some sewing projects, but they include electronics and programming in them.
For cooking, we have several cooking clubs in middle school and several short 3-day workshops in the spring focused on different kinds of cooking. Plus we have 4 million bake sales and the kids do a lot of the cooking for that.
Should we have home ec to level the playing field? To show that machine work and kitchen work is equal and both boys and girls should learn it? Maybe. Or you can have, as I did this year, a course that examines why household chores get divide down gender lines. That seems more fruitful to me.
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I was also thinking that some of these skills, sewing, button sewing, drilling, sawing, cooking might work in the middle years before the academic demands get stronger, and before the kids have sufficient knowledge/math skills to do more rigorous academic work.
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Wow, I wouldn’t have described “organizing a group of people to work together” as a feminine skill. In my experience, teenage boys are very good at forming teams where each person plays his part (“the fat kid plays catcher, the left-handed kid plays first base”). In some cases, this requires that one person give orders (“the quarterback calls the plays, the skipper decides when to tack”), and everyone accepts that. Teenage girls seem to form mere undifferentiated groups, where no one is better than anyone else.
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Not true. You just don’t understand how they’re ranking each other.
The tweenish-young teen boys I have observed are quite terrible at doing the organization you’ve described, as well as organizing for theater productions, newspaper, group school projects, . . . . as well as in sports. They seem to do OK when a coach assigns their roles, but I’m not seeing much organizing around here. Potentially they will emerge with this skill in a couple of years when they become full-fledged teens.
I might be stretching to imagine that girls in general are successful at this kind of organizing (think, editor of a newspaper, and potentially an elected editor of a newspaper, so one who cannot boss without consent)– since my individual observation of n=1 might not generalize to all girls.
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My son is very good that kind of thing (and was as a tween) , but my daughter is a disaster at it. So there is another observation.
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I think this would get more traction as “life skills summer camp”. Equivalent to swim class – an important life skill, but not required for college and thus relegated to the summer months.
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You have to come up with a trendier name, though.
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In 7th grade, we had coed sewing, cooking, mechanical drawing, and wood shop; one course every quarter. in 8th grade, we had coed sewing, cooking, wood shop and electrical wiring. I can’t say that the boys absorbed the lesson that all of these skills would be required of them as adults. On the other hand, we girls were sure we wouldn’t actually need to work a jigsaw later in life. What I will say is that the “college prep” focus of the high school doesn’t seem to be preparing students for college anyway; 80% of NYC high school graduates are placed in remedial writing and math courses when they get to a state school like CUNY. So they can’t write or prepare a well-balanced nutritious meal for 4…
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“In 7th grade, we had coed sewing, cooking, mechanical drawing, and wood shop; one course every quarter.”
We had a very similar system in 7th grade: drafting, home ec, drama, and maybe art in the one of the quarters?
It was a nice way to provide a sort of “sampler plate” of quarter-long courses that students might want to try full-length versions of in high school.
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Autistic Youngest has a lifeskills class that mostly focuses on culinary activity but puts in a range of other “real world” concerns. She’s also taken tech classes (so did neurotypical Eldest). I agree that these are very important skills but most curricula seem stuffed to the gills in order to achieve a four-year graduation. What can you let slide, especially if you’re focused on a particular vocational or university path after high school? For many kids, the answer is “nothing much else” so these valuable classes don’t get the focus or the enrolments.
Of course, my own high school years were much more free-wheeling. I did home ec and shop in junior high, not in high school, but there I managed to graduate in three years while still taking two years of typing and a year of accounting. Those courses also stand out as the most formative of my truly excellent high school education. All the classical history that I learned in Grade Nine went in one ear and out the other but typing and bookkeeping? Wow, those skills made me what I am today.
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Yup, I also remember typing and home ec, also in junior high as classes where I learned things I use.
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Like SheilaG’s, our kids’ public high school (Melbourne, Australia) makes a year of “shop” and cooking (which they call Food Tech and it includes nutrition education as well as hands-on cooking) compulsory for all students of any and all genders. I think it’s enormously useful, not only for teaching kids skills which they might otherwise not get because of gender expectations and parent involvement (I’m no welder or carpenter these days) but some of the kids are dead-set hothouse flowers who are at risk of becoming brains in vats and I think they benefit from these classes.
I still use a very nice soup ladle which daughter made in Tech class.
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But I also think that we need more home ec classes, because working with your hands is deeply rewarding. I enjoy cooking food. I enjoy digging up my lawn to create a garden. I got an A+ in my shop class in middle school, because I was an excellent sander.
Confirmation bias at work! I, personally, think that we should have more mathematics in high school, with completion of linear algebra and mathematical statistics mandatory. Plus, double biology and chemistry and two years of European history. But those are just the things that *I* like.
And I hated shop.
Actually, we should do what the British do, where people choose what courses they take and get qualifications in. So, if you want to take all home ec and shop, go to it. If you want to take only sciences, that’s an option as well. You just live or die by your decisions…
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I agree that there should be more stats in school but don’t think linear algebra would be a good addition. Although we all imagine more of what we like, I think the argument here is more of what would make children well rounded members of society. For me, that’s stats yes, but linear algebra no, and yes to domestic skills (though I think these can be taught faster than Lin algebra, so are not as much of an investment).
I think we do allow choices in us schools. The problem is that the “take the most rigorous curriculum” requirement precludes a lot of options.
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“(though I think these can be taught faster than Lin algebra, so are not as much of an investment).”
Exactly.
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Linear algebra is basically just learning how to think in math. I don’t see how you can do stats without it.
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According to Wikipedia, linear algebra is much broader than I was thinking of. Never mind.
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I agree that there should be more stats in school but don’t think linear algebra would be a good addition. Although we all imagine more of what we like, I think the argument here is more of what would make children well rounded members of society.
But how can you possibly understand (I mean, really understand) economics without a good command of linear algebra?
Obviously I was being facetious. The point I was trying to make is that everyone wants to add things that they themselves liked. Laura likes shop and home ec, so more home ec for you! I think that the shop class I took was the biggest waste of time (with the worst group of people) ever.
think we do allow choices in us schools.
Not the way the British do. In the last few years of high school one only takes a restricted set of subjects. You take pretty much as much or as little as you want, but only the subjects that you want to get qualifications in. So, if you are planning to go to university in the sciences then you take only math and science courses for the last two years. If you want to go in the humanities, you don’t take any math for that time. And if you want to go for an apprenticeship then you take the relevant vocational courses.
The problem is that the “take the most rigorous curriculum” requirement precludes a lot of options.
This would be nice if our system was actually rigorous. But their university bound students basically start out about two to four semesters ahead of ours.
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I too took required home ec, shop and typing in junior high. I do use the skills frequently in everyday life. However, I have grave doubts about the outcome of requiring schools to teach a list of skills. (Hmm, rather like Common Core.)
It depends on how a school deals with outside requirements. Our local public school seemed to require all extraneous requirements to be taught by the physical education staffers, with predictable results. If home ec were to be required, the same gym teacher who taught sex ed through in-class movies would use in-class movies to teach cooking. There are probably movies for classroom use on wood shop, child care, and other topics too. The Smart Board is such a useful device!
Sure, one could think of novel ways to include the skills in other curricular areas. It represents a restriction on the teachers who are responsible for, say, middle school science to tell them, “oh, by the way, you should have no problem folding in instruction in how to iron a shirt into your unit on energy use, right?”
Lecturing boys on how to make beds and babysit will not make them nurturing caretakers in later life. It’s also a real waste of time to require everyone to take the same classes. Such mandates should be used with restraint.
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Yes, how the subject would be taught is a relevant consideration. I’ve heard a similar argument about the problems of introducing computer science in schools, without addressing the issue that attracting good CS teachers is probably a non-trivial endeavor. And, assigning a random teacher to teach CS won’t particularly contribute to good learning.
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