Bring Back Home Economics in Schools!

I loved this article so I am reprinting it......

Bring Back Home Economics in Schools!

Cooking and nutrition skills are crucial to a happy, healthy life. So why don't schools teach them? By Hillari Dowdle

http://www.cookinglight.com/eating-smart/nutrition-101/school-home-economics-00412000077150/

"In 1964, my mom, Nancy, received the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award for the talent she demonstrated in home economics. She took the class four years in a row, learning to sew, maintain a tidy house, and care for children, as well as plan menus, balance food budgets, and cook nourishing dishes. She fully expected to become a housewife and raise a family. Which she did.

By the time I reached high school in the late '70s, the women's movement was in high gear. No way would I bother with the details of domestic life. I fully expected to go to college and have a career. Which I did.

For me, home ec had not been required, recommended, or—in many cases—available at all. What's more, it seemed like a faintly embarrassing relic of a life I never expected to live. Until, of course, I did. At 40, I quit my job, had a baby, and began playing house for the first time in my life to a sometimes comic, sometimes catastrophic effect.

Looking at the statistics, you'd never know that there is an entire generation of "lost girls" like me (and boys) who graduated from high school with few practical home-making skills. That's because the percentage of students who participated in Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS, as home ec was rechristened in 1994) was roughly the same in 2005 as it was in 1962, when my mom was in her heyday: about 25%, according to Carol Werhan, PhD, professor in FACS education at Pittsburgh State University. But the numbers don't tell the whole story.

"It used to be that when you took home ec, you took it for a full year at a time," Werhan says. "Now kids can take only one nine-week period, and there's no way to tell how comprehensive their education is. And beyond the question of quantity, the quality of education is vastly different."

In today's tight economic times, what remains of home ec has morphed into something more like vo tech. "FACS classes have had to shift their focus to the jobs market," Werhan explains. "Now you get classes designed to help train young chefs, caterers, hotel and restaurant managers, child-care workers, and fashion merchandisers. What you don't get are the skills everybody really needs: basic household management." Cooking and nutrition—two of the central tenets of traditional home ec curricula—have all but disappeared.

"We fought throughout the '70s and '80s to make the case that [home ec skills] were the skills everyone would need to survive in the world," says Marilyn Wagner, who has taught FACS at East High School in Pueblo, Colorado, for 23 years. "But when we lost the battle for a comprehensive education in the field, we ceded nutrition to science teachers—many of whom just don't teach it. And cooking skills fell off the map altogether."

East High is an International Baccalaureate School, known for its academic excellence and success in prepping kids for attendance at the best universities in the country. "We are so focused on getting them ready for college, but we're not preparing them for life," Wagner says.

Public health experts , nutritionists, and educators are beginning to realize that the lack of basic life skills, like cooking, presents a serious problem: Americans are growing up ignorant about the whats, whys, and hows of eating healthy.

Alice Lichtenstein, DSc, professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University, believes this has a direct link to the obesity epidemic. Since 1980, as traditional home ec classes waned, the rate of obesity among children ages 2 to 19 tripled.

"Prevention is more powerful than treatment, but it is difficult when our education system is not teaching children how to prepare fresh food," Lichtenstein says. "Every child—male and female—should have those skills, but many don't grow up in an environment where there's someone to teach or model them."

Werhan and Wagner agree that change will only happen when parents demand it—when women like me begin to realize we lost out on something important and demand that our kids receive the education we missed."

See also LA Times Article

Welcome to a sassy, creative twist on an American Classic - and not your Mom's Home Ec!

This is my first post and we are "off and running".

Where does your mind go when you think of high school Home Economics class?  Does it wander back to an era of June Cleaver, starchy aprons or does it remind you of burned cupcakes and skills you thought (at the time) you would never use?

Well my dear friends, this is NOT your mother's home ec ...at least it's not these days!

Look around you and what do you see crossing the street or in the malls?  Lots of chubby people eating fast food?  Lots of processed food from little plastic packets?  People woofing down meals in cars?  Do they actually taste what they are eating?  Do they even like the flavors?  Funny thing is, with the cut backs in school funding and home ec going the way of the dodo bird and the dinosaur, too many people are forgetting how to cook a meal...complete with the basic food groups!  Although the video shown below is laughable, one thing is completely true......it's a skill to make a taste and healthy meal from lesser expensive items.

You may wonder, why fast food has become so popular.....Some folks are simply intimated by the thought of cooking.  Others are too busy and think its too time consuming. For me, its actually fun and relaxing (similar to a hobby or sport EXCEPT you can't eat a scrapbook or a football....but I swear I have seen some of my students try!)

I am dedicating the blog to dispelling the myths about home ec...to enjoy the pursuit of flavor, food as art and all good things edible.............with a little craziness on the way.  If you try a recipe and enjoy it, respond to the blog or send me a note.  It if flopped for you, let me know.  Even teachers like to learn too!