Today, young adults often feel lost and lack basic life skills.
‘Home Economics’ or ‘Family and Consumer Sciences’ taught life skills in seven main areas. These, according to ACH News were:
- Cooking
- Child Development
- Education and community awareness
- Home management and design
- Sewing and textiles
- Budgeting and economics
- Health and hygiene
Nowadays, children who do not take these classes go on to university only to find out that they do not know basic life skills and how to take care of themselves. For almost everything, young adults turn to Google and Youtube, scrolling through endless “How to” articles and videos. As a result, many argue that Home Economics classes need to be brought back. Of course, they need to be different from what they were years ago in the 50s; that is, both genders need to take the class and learn the same things.
Young adults are ashamed to admit that they want to learn.
Learning how to make rice at the age of 20 is a profoundly embarrassing experience as you realize that you lack basic survival skills. Adeline Dimond, a writer for Medium, explains her mixed feelings about wanting to learn how to ‘run a household’ as her grandmother and mother were first and second-wave feminists:
Mom was well meaning but perhaps confused, operating under the loose theory that if learned to cook, sew or otherwise “run a household” I would somehow end up somebody’s housewife, a wolftrap of womanhood second-wave feminism was desperately trying to unlock. Home Ec was a painful reminder that female and male labor was different, and maybe always would be.
Home economics teaches children more than most AP classes do.
While AP history or calculus teach students valuable information, they do not teach them how to survive. The world we currently live in is stressful, fast-paced, and chaotic. Learning home economics in school would take a huge weight off the shoulders of young adults as they do not have to learn basic life skills on their own and with the help of the Internet. Caitlyn Clancey explains that after encountering students who did not know what property taxes were, University professor Marti Harvey commented on the need for Home Economics classes:
It’s a failing of our educational system that students don’t leave high school with this basic understanding, among other things. That’s why we need to bring back the old home economics class. Call it ‘Skills for Life’ and make it mandatory in high schools. […] Teach basic economics along with budgeting, comparison shopping, basic cooking skills, and time management.
Give them a better start in real life than they get now.
