Home Economics
As I started to make my son's Halloween costume, a strange creature named Vivi from a game called Final Fantasy, yes I am making it myself, and yes, I know I am ahead of the curve as my Halloween and Christmas and Chanukah shopping is already in full bloom, I was thrust back into my public jr. high school home economics class where I learned how to sew with a sewing machine. Now, if you asked me what I learned in jr. high I would reply: photosynthesis, JFK's assassination and how to sew a dress from a Simplicity pattern. Like bike riding, I was amazed this morning at how quickly I was sewing nice, straight seams, moving with ease as I navigated my homemade pattern. Laying a zipper, making a hem, waistband and even a dart all came back to me with little to no trial and error. I remembered back to a day when I was taught those skills along with rudimentary cooking, music, drama and the basic food groups of learning, science, math, english, history, foreign language and even art, that now being a discarded basic and a vanishing breed of even extra-curricular activities. I remember learning how to draw in 3 D, to make a square into a cube, a room with walls and windows. Skills I use on a daily basis. Lost to current students in the downsizing of education. Even the name of the class, home economics is lost as everyone struggles to find their way in this tech driven/ business society. Any mother or father for that matter who has taken care of her own home economics, cleaning, cooking, mending and minor carpentry skills will lament the lack of respect and remuneration given to those fields yet they are vital to the sustaining of any race of people and are crucial to a public body growing and developing.
I AM NOT SAYING THAT I FACE THAT DAILY ECONOMIC CRISIS, SO ALL YOU SOON-TO- RESPOND-WITH-YOUR-COMMENTS FOLKS TAKE A CHILL PILL AND JUST GO WITH ME HERE.
I am not, for a second, trying even to relate to the daily struggle of a low-income mother trying to raise and educate her children in today's crumbling economy. I am only saying that my ability to sew this outfit, pants, hat, and jacket, with facing and grommets and zippers is only because I was TAUGHT. It reminds me how far we have fallen in giving our children the skills they need to succeed either in the big business world or in the big household world. We are FAILING. In music, art, home-ec, cooking, shop (remember shop?) as well as the basics, according to every study we are FAILING. We are Americans and we are getting an F in educating our children. Wake up and smell the global competition. Twenty other countries beat us in science; we are listed 24th in math. We need to let our elected leaders know that education should be the most important issue in this election. Without it, our children, the future of this great nation, will be unprepared and will watch jobs being given to people from other countries.
I am glad that I was given these skills as part of a basic, public school education. I want that for all children. So that whether they end up a political leader, scientist, teacher, artist or homemaker they all are given the best education possible so that they can develop their God given talents and abilities and flourish and thrive as adults.
Maybe if Obama wins, I will sew him a nice tie to wear for his inauguration.
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When I was in junior high, I too had home economics classes, and typing, and those skills have come in handy. So much has changed, though. In those days, it was actually cheaper to make clothes than to buy them off the rack because it was somewhat before clothing was being assembled in third world countries and shipped back to the US to be sold more cheaply than they could be made at home.
Also, learning how to measure and prepare food from scratch was once more economical than dining out --- now one compares what their time is worth to prepare food from scratch against what it costs to get pre-made food that has only to be nuked.
I have subsequently learned to use a computer and other skills that have become necessary in the 21st century.
I think the issues that have been discussed that are relevant are preparing young people to reason via critical thinking courses; paying teachers a living wage and making other investments in our schools; and evening up the economy so that if a young person would really be ideally suited for a trade rather than a profession, that the trade would give them an equal opportunity to succeed rather than being forever lagging, the working poor. Doctors and lawyers are necessary for the society --- why they and industrialists and movie stars make more money than others who work hard and have families to support has never been adequately explained to me.
Are we seeing the last gasp of the entrenched white majority in America, I wonder.
I know what you mean about what used to be taught, and I have a 13 year old and I know how the public educational system is failing him. But the talk about education these days is pointing in the wrong direction, it seems to me. As long as there is this huge income gap, education is going to to try and push our children in the direction of Ivy League, succeed at all costs, broker-tra
Until we have a national dialogue about what skills we should value -- home making? teaching? plumbing? research? -- we will continue down the road of pushing all children in a narrow direction that many simply do not want to follow. The "standardized" mentality that now grips the educational system is just one proof of this myopic, unilateral vision and it will never accomplish its own mission, because there is no "one way," standardized path for all children.
Teacher education needs to radically change in the very near future, to include cultural learning differences, but more importantly we need to decide, as a nation, that we value something on this earth more than being a million/bi
i'm over 50--i remember when i was in school, band and music were cut due to budgeting, boys weren't allowed to take home ec and girls were not allowed to take shop class---but, the classes we were required to take we didn't just get a free pass on, we had to actually EARN our grades, not like nowadays where 'no child is left behind' and all children suffer as a consequence
i think that ethics classes should be taught as soon as a kid learns how to read--right beside reading writing and arithemetic and they should also teach kids more about how our government is SUPPOSED TO FUNCTION--like parliamentary procedure, petitions, public documents and public meetings..
I completely agree. I'm a little too young to have been taught Civics in school, so I got that at home from my mother, but that's another bygone class that would come in handy for kids. I remember when I was in junior high how I bristled when I got Shop and my friend Alex got Typing. I was jealous. I was a small, arty boy with aspirations to write. To this day I peck and search (quickly, but still, writing novels and scripts would go faster if I really knew how to type). But I did have an afternoon art class that was regular curriculum, not extracurricular. I was already artistic, so I was ahead of the curve in that class, but I enjoyed my daily sessions there. It was nice to have a class where being creative was appreciated and encouraged.
Music, art, all those types of humanities classes, are seen as dispensable and unnecessary; they're not. Like Ms. Curtis points out, they make a person more whole. There was a corny old film short called "Why Industrial Arts?" that showed two boys discussing shop class at length, and how beneficial it was. Learning skills. Learning how to identify shoddy materials from good. It was silly, and mocked very well on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it made a point. I pity public school kids today. They're really getting the short shrift.
Well Jamie,
I agree that if we are committed to public education (I really think we should look at least some of the ideas that privatize wholly or partially PE to increase competition and therfore accountability) then we should have it pretty high on the list of government spending priorities. And in fact it already is in most states. I live in CA where almost half the state budget is spent on public education.
You did not comment on how you would propose to improve the results of public education but the left in general and pols in particular always say what is needed is MORE money. This is where I may deviate from you (since you did not comment on funding I do not really know for sure). CA spends spends over $11K per student in K-12. Thats is nearly triple the amount in inflation adjusted dollars spent in the early 90's on K-12. Yet I notice that there is less services provided by the schools than before. For example, there is virtually no district that offers drivers ed any more. I believe the shop/home ec classes you mentioned are offered to only a few students as electives instaed of to everyone. I feel like we are paying more and getting less. This signals to me more a lack of proper financial planning more than lack of funds.
What do you think?
Health care for educators is siphoning off the top of pile of money for education. We have seen a 78% increase in health care costs. Dig around in the budgets a bit I'm sure it isn't all being frittered away on Cadillac cars , oxycotin, and cocaine. Oh and those No child left behind exams come at a huge cost. 1000 bucks per kid,
You do the math, if you can....
I'm with you, Jamie. in addition to repairing clothes so we don't have to keep consuming, our educational system should teach our kids about money and begin the tutorial in kindergarten. By the time they graduate 8th grade, they should know:
-how to balance a check book
-read a utility bill in terms of energy used/month
-understand/recite the difference between APY and APR
-know what BEAR means as it relates to the stock market
-be able to compute change back from a purchase without looking at the register to see how much they should be getting back.
High school basics should include a semester of auto repair required by both genders
These basics for 21st century living we somehow forgot to pass along in the last quarter of the 20th century as we raised our 'entitled' children.
marla
HuffPost's Pick
Good points here.
I think history is really important too. Our lack of historical knowledge is another factor as to why polititians can so easily manipulate us on government policy and other issues.
About 30 years ago, I was one of them so I know what we did, when the computer industry was going gang busters, we had a manpower problem. We were in dire need of educated workers. We were told to look for bright ambitious new teachers and offer them about three times what they were making. During those career days that we put on for free, we were taking names and numbers. The brightest, most ambitious joined us. The ones who were more concerned about their tenure stayed. Teachers with a Masters and 10 years experience still don't make that much money.
Prior to that, our schools were more like the Athenian educational experience. Teachers mingled with the students at lunch time and were otherwise, just available. There was always a teacher involved meeting at someone's home during the week. It was not unusual to see a teacher and students discussing the Scarlet Letter during breaks. "Hey Mr. Todd! Did you know that the potato famine wasn't really a famine?" "What do you mean it wasn't a famine?"
We were nurtured. As the people who liked their jobs left, the nurturing stopped. Then the Feds got involved illegally and passed legislation making the schools more oppressive and punishing the kids instead of the culprits.
The educational system will not be fixed until we double teachers' salaries and attract talented people who like their jobs. The Feds are not educators so, we need to make them get lost, too.
There are several problems that need to be addressed. It's not that we need more money, we need to make the people handling the money start accounting for it. The schools have no business spending hundreds of millions of our tax dollars buying land for future schools. If a developer wants to build homes, have him donate land to accomodate the increase in kids. We have a very large boomer population that is going into their retirement years, In the next 20 yrs, we will see a large de-population growth because of this. We need more indians and less cheifs in running the schools system and pay the teachers more. Education starts in the home, so all the parents out there, don't expect society to educate your kids on basics of home activities. Skills and reading and computer for the 21st century, use the dollars wisely.Wit
darcy, try to see "education" as a way to develop and hone critical thinking. Yet, to encourage critical thinking in schools is anathema: they must submit to the authority of the teacher and their texts without really knowing the real basis for this authority.
Young persons live in a digital, networked/social world now. This world is not governed by authorities who threaten them with a bad grade or the social disgrace of not receiving a diploma. This world they spend 4 to ten hours a day in is more horizontal than authoritarian; "true" is more like reliability (concurrence), not whether some textbook or some teacher said so. Thus, they spend part of their lives in a world of authority (precluded from asking challenging questions) and the other part in a non-authoritarian environment where the rewards are almost exclusively of a social nature (e.g. how many "Friends" do you have on Facebook).
Next, they move into "The Real World" where we as a society DESPERATELY need them to challenge policy and goals for our country. It ain't happnin. Most high school graduates, I fear, move into the working world waiting for some authority to tel them what to do. They wouldn't know how to spell 'initiative' or what it might mean to be a critical thinking.
I so agree; and while we're at it; can you add balancing a checkbook and some financial responsibility courses, credit cards, 401k's, paying bills, etc. It is mind boggling to me how little this generation of 18-30 year olds know about basic finances and living on one's own.
And I'd add
How to shake hands
How to introduce yourself and your friends
How to research: how to FIND answers
How to analyze media, particularly faux news, and deconstruct them critically
How to write a persuasive short article
How to run a meeting
Heinlein got it right a long time ago:
""A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
How quickly we forget how little we ourselves knew when we got out of school. Financial responsibility, as with all responsibility, is learned by doing, not by being told. The best a school could offer is a zero-risk financial planning game in which students could try out some strategies and see what happens, but it would still not make kids financially responsible. Did/does driver's ed make responsible drivers?
Also, notice how many different people have very specific agendas and priorities for the education of our youth, each of them based on their own narrow experience. Why should your experience of life in the late 20th century and the guesses you make on the basis of that as to the needs of the 21st century define what my son or daughter has to learn? I might make at least as good a guess, and then at least they would know who to blame when I turned out to be wrong. We should step back from making kids learn all these things and instead ensure that if they want to learn something they are afforded the opportunity to learn it well.
That's a lot of philosophizing, but the practical implications would be: Hire teachers who are expert in their field of interest, allow kids to study what they will, and pass only kids who have mastery of the material in their course.
When President Obama takes the oath of office, maybe he should wear a tie that MANY people submit!
Lots of folks can sew (my pal Ollie taught me...in Art School!), and my pal Julie in Portland is a great example of what Jamie's talking about: real home-making skills. Use of hand tools. Cooking, sewing, canning (she taught me to can local raspberries), etc.
I think Jamie should wrangle a national project to Sew President Obama A Tie For The Inaugural!!
The submissions can be shown at President Obama's first arts exhibition in the new administration. The winning tie goes to America's Museum, The Smithsonian.
Dan
The sky is not falling. Education is always important, but the past (when girls took home ec and boys took shop) was no panacea. It is a trite cliche to claim "things were better when I was a kid" and "kids today blah blah blah". Please do not romanticize the past when homophobia was accepted practice and domestic violence was seldom acknowledged.
The education puzzle is complex and is a mix of bad spending policy and misguided social policy. In addition, comparison to "foreign" educational systems is frequently erroneous as well. In. In most of the world education is not universal and frequently is denied many or most. Similarly, notion of education differ and "trades" are seen as rewarding life pursuits. The American "failing" or less than adequate educational grade results in part from the Amrican notion that throwing money at education is all that is needed. Of course, much of this is a fallacy: the D.C. public schools seem to get much more than most of the nation's school, but High School dropout rates approach 7 out of 10 kids and most of those that survive cannot compete. In point of fact, good and well educated teachers result in better educated kids. In point of fact, more capable kids should have access to the best available education and not be hampered by bad schools and bad teachers. It is also true that home situations have a direct bearing on how well ids do in sschool. The truth is, money becomes insignificant if children do not want to learn and teachers cannot teach.
Let's please rethink our priorities and our methods for educating our children.
Several posters have, quite correctly, implicated parenting (or lack thereof) as a major factor in children's performance in school and life. Let's take the next step as a society and implement a curriculum that incorporates instruction in effective parenting techniques (non-violence, mutual respect - it doesn't have to be detailed, just sensible). Most parents employ the same counterproductive style they learned from their parents. We know what works. Non-violence. Mutual respect. Emotional intelligence. It's not rocket science.
And I agree with Jamie Lee that it is a mistake to not teach our children how to function as adults in the world we live in. Too much of our curriculum is stuck in the 20th (or 19th!) century. We need to figure out as a society WHAT our kids truly need to know (art and cooking, logic and history, yes - algebra and chemistry, no, for the most part) and then we need to determine HOW to deliver that knowledge. Can we move into the 21st century, please?! We have the means of ensuring that only the very best teachers deliver instructional materials (Internet, DVD), but instead we insist that every underpaid elementary teacher teach all subjects! That is a recipe for failure.
Let's stop tinkering around the edges and pretending that testing is any kind of answer. Let's rethink our priorities and our methods. Please!
That there would ever be debate about the priority of education is the issue. Our culture does not respect education, nor does it value intelligence. Teachers aren't paid proportionate to the value of the service they provide, but the government steps in to bail out bankers who approved millions of questionable, likely fraudulent, loans. With our trillion+ deficit, there will undoubtedly be more cuts in public education, so kiss goodbye even the dream of extracurricular activities. I know and appreciate what the poster is saying - in fact, I believe Ms. Curtis expresses refreshing and resonating takes on current events, i.e., how best to raise children. I just believe that if we can refocus on why education is the ticket out of so many morasses in which we currently find ourselves, I would be happy with merely that. Our country needs to value education as much as the families of our best students.
Dear Ms. Curtis
The system of education that we are stuck with, here in the US is and always has been interested in achieving only two ends.
The first is to produce an unwaveringly obedient work force to serve our corporate masters, and the second is to insure that the very crucial art of "critical thinking" is never taught and certainly never encouraged.
The great George Carlin sums it up depressingly well in this important clip.
http://www
yes, commanderwhitehead, they don't want our kids educated, they want good little obedient soldiers and policemen that just follow orders and don't ask questions or have the ability to analyze
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