What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec

Home economics seems antiquated – a class that teaches high school kids how to bake a cake and sew doesn’t sound super useful. But would you believe that everything from the obesity epidemic to student debt can be chalked up to home ec disappearing? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:33Speaker 00

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• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's us today. We've got our aprons on, we have our spatulas in hand, we've been spanking each other with them, and it's time to go to class with Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. Just so you know, there's construction happening next door, so if you hear a saw or a hammer banging, it's not me.

• 2:04Josh Clark?

  No, it's not Chuck.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Sometimes you just gotta live with the sounds of life.

• 2:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, we recorded for a while, and every time we recorded, a fire truck would go by, like clockwork. Do you remember?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, in the old Buckhead office. It was, I think we were near a fire station.

• 2:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but it was like the exact same time. It was really bizarre.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  It was the Radiolab guys pulling fire alarms all over Atlanta.

• 2:31Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, we're talking about home ec today. Did you ever take a home ec class?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  I sure did, buddy. How about you?

• 2:38Josh Clark?

  I did. I have very vague recollections of it. I remember the room and everything, but I don't remember anything I did. It's also possible I'm conflating it with an episode of Saved by the Bell.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I took it. You know, we had the full kitchen situation in our high school back then, and I took it because, I don't know why I took it. I think I needed an elective and, you know, I knew there'd be cute girls in there. And maybe I had a friend or two that took it was probably my reasoning.

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  I could see that. I think both of us are the types of dudes who would not have been like, I can't take home ec, I'm a boy.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  No, no, of course not. And there were plenty of dudes in the class.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because Gen X is enlightened.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:22Josh Clark?

  The thing is, is we were really in the minority, though. All the dudes in your class were in the minority. From what I read, that was pretty uncommon even even at that time. And we were among like the last age group who could elect for home ec pretty much across the country. Like this was a time, this was about the end of the time where you could find a home ec classroom in most high schools or middle schools, but that is not the case anymore. Although it's still around, it's just not everywhere like it used to be.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in fact, I can confirm when I went back to my high school a couple of years ago, when they had me back to talk to students as a, you know, interesting professional.

• 4:01Josh Clark?

  I remember that.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was fun. I took a walk around and I even remember going by where the home ec room was, and it was definitely not my kitchen anymore.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  No, I remember you told me they filled in all the sinks with cement.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was called the cement glass.

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  So classes get really boring really fast.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, we should probably say home ec stands for home economics, just in case that's foreign to your tongue.

• 4:26Josh Clark?

  True, true. I understand that it's called home ec or home economics in Australia, and I think maybe Canada and in the UK, they call it food sciences, I think.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:35Josh Clark?

  It's all the same thing. And essentially what it is, for those of you who don't know, it was a class in high school where you would learn basic life skills that had a lot to do with being at home. You would learn sewing, you would learn to bake a cake. As time wore on, you would learn to take care of a child, maybe learn to balance a checkbook, just basic life skills as a class in high school or middle school. And that is, it turns out, I didn't quite realize the extent of home ec. One little slice of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because it was made by home economists.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 5:17Josh Clark?

  And there's a whole history to it, and it's actually pretty feminist in nature, too.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, as we'll see, there was a bit of a push-pull at a certain time, and which wave of feminism would that have been?

• 5:29Josh Clark?

  The dose.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  The dose, yeah, where, you know, there were certain people saying like, no, this is, you know, you shouldn't be teaching women to stay at home and stay in the kitchen. And other people are like, we're not teaching them saying you have to do that, but we're saying, you know, there are viable careers that you can gain in, you know, industrial engineering and statistics. And as we'll see, you know, plenty of of science careers came out of home economics and food science, because it is a science.

• 5:59Josh Clark?

  Right. And that was actually one of the initial points of it. But if you were a home ec proponent and you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying, let me give you a little picture of what life used to be like for the average woman in the United States before we came along. And you would start in about the 19th century, they run the turn of it. So they were still wearing tricorned hats, but they were looking forward to trains.

• 6:26Josh Clark?

  And if you were a farm woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what we know as home ec was not early home ec because early home ec was like, you might have seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm. And you might have farmhands that you also have to kind of care for and feed. So you're feeding these huge families from stuff that you're growing probably on your land and processing and canning and churning butter and you're hand making clothes and doing laundry by hand. And it's, it's, it's a lot.

• 7:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and like you would say that that's not even home economics. That's just home terribleness, right?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:06Josh Clark?

  When home economics came along, it was based on this idea that, okay, all of these people are working really hard. There has to be ways to improve this, to make it more efficient.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:17Josh Clark?

  I suspect, and I'm pretty sure we talked about it, that this all grew out of Taylorism, that obsession with getting things as efficient as possible. And I think that that kind of grew out of that same vein. And there were actually a few things that kind of came together to, to make the fertile soil that home ec grew from. One of them, the big one, was literacy started to spread in the, the mid 19th century. And so when literacy spreads, you've got more books and like domestic tips in householding was a whole genre of books. So were cookbooks. And then part and parcel of that was this kind of, the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women can be educated too, but just in women's stuff.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the books were important because previous to that, it was, everything was sort of handed down from, you know, parent to child as far as any kind of wisdom goes about how to do anything.

• 8:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  So if you had books and you had classes, you didn't depend on like your grandmother necessarily being good at, you know, baking a cake or something like that.

• 8:25Josh Clark?

  Like what if your grandmother was a dipstick, right?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:29Josh Clark?

  So cooking schools also emerged. And this was important because your grandmother might also, in addition to being a dipstick, might not have been that great of a cook. Now there's a place you can go to learn to cook well and nutritiously. That was a big one, too. And then also, this was a new career path that a woman could take to become a cook in like, say, a wealthy household. So they were training now people to work outside of the house doing domestic stuff.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And then one of the biggest ones was the Morrill Act of 1862, and that's when land-grant colleges were established. And all of a sudden, there were schools that said, hey, maybe we should offer, you know, it was kind of the beginnings of trade schools, like, you know, teach people how to work in agriculture and industry and things like that, and not necessarily just sit around with your nose in the air, reading the classics.

• 9:22Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And women were open, or these colleges were open to women as well, too. So these three things come together. And one of the other reasons that really made home ec kind of come to life, start sprouting from that fertile soil, was the transition that America was going through with industrialization. All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to do things. Like, you were in the city now, surrounded by people you've not really ever met before, with a husband who now works in the factory rather than the farm. And you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing. And so home ec kind of came in to fill that break that had happened, that

• 10:03Josh Clark?

  intergenerational passage of knowledge from mother to daughter. Home ec said, hey, forget mothers. We're going to tell you how to do this, and we're going to tell you how to do it better. They didn't really say, forget mothers. That wasn't the sentiment. That was me being a smart aleck.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, you know, initially, it was not in high school. It was a college-level thing. And there is a PhD named Nancy Darling, who kind of backs up this idea that it was a feminist movement to begin with, with this quote. She said it developed, home ec that is, from something radical, the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful, and here's the key for me, economically significant. And it was economics. They didn't just call it that to make it seem fancy. The running of a household is big-time economics. And if you're not good at that, as we'll see with, you know, younger generations, it can spell trouble.

• 10:58Josh Clark?

  For sure. Yeah, yeah, for, yeah, there's a whole, a whole washout that's happened that we'll cover for sure. But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to is Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in the history, or the early history at least, of home economics. No, let's just say it, the entire history of home economics. She was a pretty impressive sort. She studied chemistry, she got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar, and then became the first woman to get a degree from MIT, and then became the first woman instructor at MIT, and set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only. And this was not really domestic work. It was figuring out

• 11:39Josh Clark?

  water quality and air quality tests, like essentially the foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection, too. That's what this lab was doing. And the reason why you associate it with Home Ec is because one of the reasons Home Ec existed also, you said that it started at the college level, was as a way for women, almost a backdoor, a workaround, a loophole, for women to become scientists. It was okay, as long as there was enough of a whiff of woman's work, like clean water, that's woman's work, that academia could put up with it. That was one of the big ways Home Ec started funneling women into education and into the sciences.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, she was trying to improve the United States. And she thought, and she was, you know, right on the money. She was like, if I'm gonna try to improve, you know, the United States and civilization, then I have to start at what she considered, and you know, I think most people agree, is the basic unit, which is a family, the family unit. And if I can each, if I can get each household, one at a time, to practice, you know, more efficient practices, more sanitary practices, safer practices, you know, where you're not, you know, burning kitchens down and things like that.

• 12:54Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Then it'll, you know, all boats will rise. And it started to become a movement. And, you know, this is like the late 1800s, early 1900s.

• 13:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and remember also, there is a big emphasis on this work is important. Like, this is unpaid labor, but it produces a lot of dividends for any family, and hence, building upward for civilization, for a nation's civilization, all that. So like you said, this was starting to become a movement, and they had a series of conferences called the Lake Placid Conferences, starting right at the turn of the century. And at one of these meetings, they chose the term "home economics", like you said, to basically point out, not to kind of latch their field on economics, to point out that domestic work was a huge part of economics. And up to this point, economists had basically just been looking at production. They weren't looking at the demand side.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  And one of the things Home Ec introduced was the idea of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part of the larger economy, which is, you can't do economics without that now, but that's one of the things Home Ec introduced.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they came up with the name Home Ec at one of those conferences after debating domestic science. And they said, "No, that doesn't sound like it's studying consumerism. That's a big part of this." I think "household arts" was put forward. And they said, "No, that sounds too artsy-fartsy and not academic enough." So they landed on home economics. And an ironic twist that kind of takes it back home, because the word "economics" or "economics" comes from, I love this word, "oikonomia", I inserted an extra "i" there, which is ancient Greek for "household management", so there you have it.

• 14:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they dropped the old-timey mic at this point.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And then in 1908, at that same conference, the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the American Home Economics Association, really got the ball rolling. And then shortly after, in 1917, the Hughes Act started funding vocational education, like shop class and Home Ec, and it was off to the races.

• 15:09Josh Clark?

  Yep. So you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, like you said, Home Ec starts to take off?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 15:31Josh Clark?

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• 18:54Josh Clark?

  Okay, so when we left off, home ec was starting to take off. And by the 1920s, the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, had created the Bureau of Home Economics. And when you create a bureau dedicated to a new field, that's when the field has arrived. If you're a band and Weird Al has done a cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived. If you're a field of study and someone opens a bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your field's arrived. But it became the country's biggest employer of women scientists, which is pretty significant at the time.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  That's right. Their mission, of course, was education. And it wasn't just, you know, how to cook, obviously. It was meal planning, it was budgeting. There was a lot of science behind it because they got into, you know, nutritional values like in any, you know... Nutritional tag that you read, and in fact, any like clothing tag that you read, I'll go ahead and get ahead of that one. That all was born out of the science of this new bureau that was founded. They were testing mildew proofing for fabrics. They were servicing military service members, like, you know, trying to come up with better things for the US military to eat. And of course, school lunch programs all over the country were dependent on this science.

• 20:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented, I suspect.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Hmm, they should have a monument to that.

• 20:18Josh Clark?

  Well, one of the, I agree. One of the other things about that, though, in addition to square pizza, the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this. The pizza, it comes from Italy, and if you've ever seen an actual, like, Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza. The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern Americanized, much blander version of it, although I agree with you, it's quite good. And this is where American food, as we think of it today, was founded. All the ethnic food got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought into the home ec world, and that bland Midwestern American food took over. That's where that came from.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  And this also coincided with the birth of radio, that we've, it seems like we've talked a lot about that lately, but because of that, of course, you're going to have shows on the radio about this kind of thing. The Bureau of Home Economics in the 20s had a show called Housekeeper's Chat that ran for a couple of decades, started in 1926. Not Uncle Sam, but Aunt Sammy was the host of that one, or I guess not the host, but it featured her. And she would have like household tips and recipes and stuff like that. A lot of the brands got in the game. General Mills and Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, you know, it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And again, the bureau is like helping to get all of these things launched on the airwaves.

• 21:40Josh Clark?

  One of the other examples of the, what the Bureau of Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact, in addition to founding, like, the mass-produced food movement, was they came up with the poverty line. In fact, Molly Orshansky did. She was a statistician who studied how much a house spent to come up with a basic nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied that by three, and they came up with the federal poverty line that's still in use today.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you've ever seen astronauts eating lasagna out of what looks like a toothpaste tube or something like that, you can thank home economics and science for that because a woman named Bea Finkelstein, great name, she was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury Project, which is pretty great.

• 22:32Josh Clark?

  That's right. And then, one of the other things that struck me too that I didn't realize is that a lot of those recipes that you find on like a food label, one of the more famous ones is Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup Labels have a green bean casserole recipe. And that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's, Dorcas Riley. And she's a good example of what was happening at this time, starting in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and continuing on. These companies like General Mills and Campbell's were setting up home economics departments. And one of the things that these home economists were being paid to do was to figure out new uses for the products made by the companies they worked

• 23:16Josh Clark?

  for, so that people would buy more of that stuff. And then they put those recipes on the label.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if you love Rice Krispie Treats, you can thank the home economics program and Matilda Jensen and Mildred Day at Kellogg's there for that. And Cheeks Mix, this wasn't sort of an internal team, but Cheeks Mix was actually a contest. And it was in, I believe, the 1950s, when they just had a contest, like, what can you do with Cheeks cereal? And someone submitted Cheeks Mix. And like, it's the same recipe, basically, that everyone enjoys today, like, all of these are.

• 23:53Josh Clark?

  Did your family make Cheeks Mix around the holidays?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Not a ton. Emily's family really did, though, so she still makes, you know, that same recipe, that Cheeks Mix recipe.

• 24:03Josh Clark?

  It must be so high-o then, because my family did as well.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:06Josh Clark?

  But that's a good example of how, like, these companies farmed out the task of coming up with stuff. Because home ec had become so widespread, the average homemaker out there could do the same thing in a lot of ways that some of the home ec workers working for the company could do, too. I think that's pretty neat.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Talk about efficiencies, like if you're baking a cake from scratch, or making pancakes or something like that, or gravy from scratch. There were women in home ec departments at companies saying like, hey, we can make this. You know, there's a lot to do. So what if, what if this stuff was all kind of premixed in a box? And you could sell them like, well, I was about to say like hotcakes. And they did. And you know, this, these were things that were real time savers in the kitchen.

• 24:52Josh Clark?

  For sure. And that was the point, remember, of home ec is saving time, being more efficient. And then as food companies were concerned, making tons of money off of this stuff too. So that's kind of going on in the corporate world, the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread of home ec being taught in high school and middle school. And there was a time in the 20th century, up into the 80s and 90s. And I'm sure beyond, again, these, these classes are still out there, but not, nothing like they used to be. Where you could go into a high school or a middle school and there was a simulated kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of different stoves and ovens and refrigerators.

• 25:33Josh Clark?

  And people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby. And in some cases, taking care of a real baby too, because this stuff got intense sometimes.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that baby thing, I don't remember our high school class ever delving into that. I do remember the, the egg babies. Like where you would, I never had to take part, but I saw other kids in school carrying around the egg. And this is sort of in the 70s and 80s, they would give you a raw egg, you know, in the shell. And, because some people would be like, what the heck is he even talking about? They would give you an egg and the whole idea was you have to care for that egg without breaking it for a couple of weeks. You got to carry this thing around. It sounds easy. Just to not get that egg broken, but it's really not. You know, you have to really think ahead about everything. And that's the whole idea is that when you have a baby, you can't just make decisions on the spur of the moment.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  You have to kind of pre-plan everything. And the egg came along after they'd use real babies from orphanages.

• 26:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, apparently at some of the colleges that were teaching home ec, they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students to just basically practice on. And apparently there's a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger, who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics. And she said that for adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd show up and be like, you got any one of them babies that's been in the home economic classes?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Heck, yeah, man.

• 27:03Josh Clark?

  Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for, just with complete attention and care by women who were working in like the cutting edge of child rearing. So they were much more desirable than the non-home ec babies, it turns out.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, before I even read that part of this, I was thinking in my head like, oh, man, you want that baby for sure.

• 27:28Josh Clark?

  For sure. Apparently those eggs would get on custodians' nerves enough that they switched to flour or sugar, which also had the added benefit of heft. And I saw in like some educational magazine, I can't remember, but they would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin tones over the flour or sugar. And that sometimes if you forgot like your kid, whether it was an egg or a sack of flour or something in your locker, you might be forced to like write a paper on child abuse or something like that. So the whole point was to just teach high school kids, you don't want to have a baby at this period in your life. Maybe ever, like if the class was hard enough, maybe they're like, I'm never having a kid,

• 28:14Josh Clark?

  but certainly not through my teen years. That was the point.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's kind of funny. I think they kind of sold it to you as like here it'll, it'll teach you like how to kind of care for a baby and how much goes into that. But what they were really saying is please don't have sex.

• 28:31Josh Clark?

  Kind of.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, one of them in the 90s, they came along with a more of a, like a baby simulator. It was called Baby Think It Over. I mean, they, they flat out said it at that point.

• 28:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Like, I think we all know what Think It Over means.

• 28:45Josh Clark?

  Sure. And I, I don't know if it worked or not, but it was a great attempt at the very least.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 28:51Josh Clark?

  So by the middle of the 20th century, I think 1959, half of all American girls, half of all the girls in America were taking home ec courses in school. And then just suddenly it just dried up. It wasn't like a faucet got turned off or a light switch was turned, but it.

• 29:10Josh Clark?

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• 29:33Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic forerunner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 29:49Speaker 03

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• 30:11Speaker 08

  This stress check, AKA friendly reminder that your hobbies matter, is brought to you by State Farm, because you deserve to lose yourself in the stuff that brings you joy. Here's mine, painting my tabletop battle miniatures. Yeah, seriously. After a long day, I grab a brush, pop in some music and just get into it. And there's no wrong way to do it. It helps me clear my head, slow down and just breathe. But it works. Big stress, mini warriors, total reset. No pressure, just paint, creativity and a little reminder of what makes me happy. Some people bake, some people garden. Me, I paint warriors with interesting tech. And guess what? It works. You don't have to be good at your hobby. You just have to enjoy it.

• 30:56Speaker 08

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• 31:04Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Nile Rodgers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 31:21Speaker 05

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel...

• 31:38Speaker 06

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• 31:50Speaker 05

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 31:53Speaker 07

  You know, a song is a story, and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents and I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 32:11Speaker 05

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:23Josh Clark?

  Started to go downhill pretty fast in about the early 60s. And let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about where Home Ec went after, well, the break.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Word up, Jerry. All right, so home ec is on the decline and there's a bunch of reasons for this that kind of all kind of steamrolled together at a certain point. But one of the biggest ones was when the United States really got into standardized testing, which came along mostly with the No Child Left Behind Act, because all of a sudden, a school's funding was tied to test scores. And if there aren't any home ec questions on these tests, and the testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of even teaching that stuff? I don't agree with that, obviously, but that was sort of the thought. And so, a lot of those classes started to just slowly go away.

• 33:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and there was an article on fatherly written by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it back even further. He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the Vocational and Technical Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said, "Educators, colleges, you're no longer responsible for figuring out what we want to teach our kids. We're going to hand this over to business and industry, so they can tell us what they want us to teach, so that we can basically train workers." That was the point from that point on for school. Train workers as much as you can. And then eventually, universities got in on the act, and they're like, "Let's also make these like pipelines to colleges." So like, that's the point of high school, is to get into college, and we're going to charge them out the yin yang.

• 34:23Josh Clark?

  So, standardization of testing was a huge part of it, but that was not the only part. Like you kind of touched on earlier, Betty Friedan's feminist mystique, which kicked off the second wave of feminism, is very often cited as a huge chilling effect, or having a huge chilling effect on home ec classes being taught in high school.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. A lot of people started dropping those classes, saying it was, you know, sort of symbolic of a woman's confinement to the home and the kitchen. The Vocational Education Act of 1963, all of a sudden gutted, or at least reduced funding that that Smiths Hughes Act had brought about. So, it was, you know, shop class suffered kind of the same fate around the same time for the same reasons. We didn't have shop at my school. We had industrial arts, which I took. And I bet you anything, those have kind of lessened over the years as well, now that I think about it.

• 35:18Josh Clark?

  Isn't industrial arts the same thing as shop? Is it different?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  No, shop is like, uh, like auto shop class.

• 35:25Josh Clark?

  Oh, no, I think that's different. I think shop is like drill presses and lathes and stuff like that.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on your school. A lot of schools had auto shop class.

• 35:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Like where they taught you how to change oil and work on your carburetor.

• 35:38Josh Clark?

  For sure. My high school had that. My middle school had shop class in HOMAC.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  What'd they call the auto shop class?

• 35:45Josh Clark?

  I don't remember. I don't remember, but I saw it written somewhere as like automotive arts or something like that.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Really?

• 35:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, somewhere. Somebody said it, so I get to repeat it.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  The art of changing oil.

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  Exactly. Um, but no, I knew a couple of kids who were like, I'm going to be a mechanic. That's what I want to do after, after school. I'm not going to go to college. So it's great. I'm getting this education starting now in, in high school. Like it would give them a huge leg up to either becoming apprentices or going and taking like, classes at a technical trade school, right? That went away. Vocational education just really took a huge hit. And again, high school became a pipeline for college. HOMAC still kind of stayed around. It saw the writing on the wall. But it rebranded itself as Family and Consumer Sciences. I think because HOMAC just had such a folksy,

• 36:45Josh Clark?

  old timey name that seemed to reinforce gendered stereotypes. Family and Consumer Sciences is new. It's fresh. It's 90s, right? And they had a bigger emphasis on careers, helping people start careers outside the home, like interior design, nutrition, elder care, culinary arts. Like you could become a chef, get a huge leg up, taking high school classes about that. So that's still around today. But one of the biggest problems that Family and Consumer Science classes still have, that started around this time, is finding qualified teachers to actually teach the Family and Consumer Science classes that are still around in the US.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you didn't have, you know, if these classes started to go away, then kids aren't going to be interested in that. They're not going to, you know, develop those skills and take those classes in college. And so without universities training these teachers, you're just going to have a shortage of professionals teaching it at the high school level. And that, you know, that's still going on.

• 37:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And apparently the, like, enrollment rates are very difficult to find. Livia helped us with this, and she dug up a 2013 report that said about three and a half million high school kids took family and consumer science classes in the 2011 to 2012 school year. And that still sounds kind of impressive to me. That was a 40% drop from just the decade earlier, the aughts, the 2000s. And that they were still pretty much divided among gender lines, 65% girls and 35% boys. So they're still out there, they're still around, they've just taken such a massive hit. And yet, there's a lot of people who

• 38:29Josh Clark?

  are like, okay, I get why HOMAC, you know, took a massive hit. It needed to regroup. It's regrouped now, and we're also seeing the fallout from what happens when you don't teach middle and high school kids basic life skills. They grow up to be adults who don't know how to do basic life skills. And that seems to be happening before our very eyes.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, especially, you know, when it comes to any, any kind of like home finance, like passing basic sort of home financial literacy, or even financial literacy, it's really declining. I think there was a study from the World Economic Forum in 2024 that found that the majority of Americans can't pass a test of financial literacy.

• 39:14Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  So if you ask your average, you know, recent high school graduate, and even college graduate sometimes,

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Like, you know, tell me about interest rates. What do you know about inflation or investing or compound interest or home loans? You might get that Gen Z stare back in your face. And, you know, this is the stuff that Home Ec was teaching. You know, I don't remember so much learning sort of the nitty gritty of that stuff. But I certainly learned about, you know, banks and how to get a bank loan and how to balance your checkbook and how to kind of keep up with personal finances.

• 39:49Josh Clark?

  Exactly. Or maybe even do learn how to do basic taxes, like a simple 1040 form. Again, life stuff. And in addition to finance stuff, they would learn things like, you know, how to tell if a chicken breast was underdone or maybe a few recipes to cook. And if you don't teach people even basic stuff like how to cook, you can't really blame them for eating takeout constantly or eating nothing but prepackaged foods, right? So some people say that this has led to the obesity epidemic that the United States is facing, at least in part. It's probably a little full blown to say, yep, that's what happened. We did away with Home Ec and now that's the problem. The biggest problem is that's the food that's out there.

• 40:32Josh Clark?

  But some people are saying like, we're not, these people don't have any idea how to cook at all. The parents didn't take up the slack when the Home Ec classes went away. And so that's part of the problem that came from doing away with Home Ec.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And there are people saying that we now have generations coming up that don't know how to adult properly. Just sort of basic chores and, you know, ironing and doing laundry and just sort of the things that you need to do to survive on your own. They found that younger generations just, you know, they weren't taught that stuff as much, partially from Home Ec, partially because they weren't made to do chores like we were. There was a study from 2014 from Brown Research that said 82% of parents did chores as children, but only 28% had their children doing chores. And I think a lot of that is just...

• 41:25Speaker 03

  I don't know. We had to do a lot of chores and I think like I don't make Ruby do as many chores as I should just because I remember what a drag chores were.

• 41:34Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  But I'm also trying to think ahead of like, no, I need to teach her these life skills as well. So maybe try and mix some more of that stuff in would be a good idea.

• 41:43Josh Clark?

  I was wondering where that, what the cause was of that disconnect.

• 41:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So is that, is it simple as that? You just don't want to make your kid unhappy?

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, not, not that. We're perfectly fine with unhappiness. Uh, so yeah, it's definitely not that.

• 41:59Josh Clark?

  But that's what I'm saying. Like, and I'm not asking you to just speak for yourself, but speak for parents today.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I'm speaking for myself. No, it's very important that kids experience all the full range of emotions. So that's, that's definitely not it. It's just, um, I don't know. For me, I think it's just like chores are such a drag. And, you know, and she's like, you know, nine and now 10 years old. So I think chores will get a little more ramped up here in the tween and teen years.

• 42:27Josh Clark?

  You should buy her a straw hat and some overalls for Christmas and be like, this is the year you get started. So, um, one of the other things you might be saying is like, there's an app for everything. Like, like if you can't cook, it doesn't matter. Get DoorDash or, um, somebody's going to make food for you and will bring it to you. You just have to give them money. And it's that you just have to give them money thing. That's kind of a problem right now because, um, wages haven't kept up and debt has just continued to increase. In the second quarter of 2025, America had 1.21 trillion dollars of credit card debt. The average American had almost $6,500 of credit card debt on their card at the time.

• 43:13Josh Clark?

  So it's not like there's just some, some easy solution. Like maybe there will be as stuff like that becomes cheaper. But right now there's just a whole grab bag of, of problems that you can trace back to if not coming from home ec not being taught. Home ec being taught could have solved them or could solve or prevent them in the future.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I guess a good thing about these days is, you know, there's a YouTube tutorial, there's a thousand of them for every single task you could ever want to accomplish in life.

• 43:42Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  So, uh, in that case, it's good to have an app for that because I don't think necessarily younger generations are like, oh, I don't know how to plug in an iron. So, you know, I think they'd look that stuff up on YouTube and teach themselves. But, you know, it's also good to learn that in a classroom setting, you know?

• 44:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'm really glad you said that because this could so easily slide into, well, when we were in school, we learned all this stuff and look at how great we turned out. It could just be people who are proponents of home ec, not understanding where, where the country is going, where the culture is going, and it's going away from home ec in a different direction that will take care of itself. Um, it's not like home ec is the solution to every problem. So that's a really good argument against it. There's others too. Um, like, do we, if we bring back like vocational education, does the US need, um, jobs like that? Uh, and you can make an argument against that argument and that, yeah, we do, especially hands-on jobs, like trade skills, like plumbing and

• 44:45Josh Clark?

  electricians. Uh, Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia, said the next generation of millionaires are going to be plumbers and electricians because it's so hard to replace that with AI. So there's like arguments one way or another, but it's, you just have to be really careful not to slip into the back of my day, things were better kind of mentality.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, because that will, and rightfully get smacked back in your face. If you're like, well, how'd you learn to steam a shirt? Well, you didn't take home ec and this sort of like TikTok, bruh, like, get out of my face.

• 45:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  We do, we do things differently now and, uh, we don't have to do it the way you did.

• 45:21Josh Clark?

  That's right. Like, I can't set a table properly in like the, the exact way it's supposed to be, but our parents' generation probably learned how to do that. It doesn't matter because the culture evolved in a way that didn't need that anymore.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, just put the soup bowl down, cup your hands, and go to town.

• 45:38Josh Clark?

  There you go. Uh, yeah, I don't think we can do any better than ending on that, Chuck.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Oof, thank you.

• 45:46Josh Clark?

  So if you want to learn more about home ec, go find a home ec class and take it. And then let us know what you think about it. If you take home ec now, get in touch and tell us what's going on there because we want to hear, uh, if you got your finger on the pulse of home ec. And since I mentioned pulse, that means it's time for listener mail.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're like, what are you using for babies these days? And they're like, we're just using the babies that we've had.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Bring them into school.

• 46:12Josh Clark?

  They didn't get to us in time.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  This is a Rockettes thing. I think we ran our Rockettes episode as a select recently. Cause tis the season. And we heard from Santa Claus, you guys. Hey, just wanted, I didn't know Santa was a listener, but it turns out he is. Just listened to the selects on the Rockettes. You did a wonderful job. I heard you say you hope a Rocket writes in, which by the way, did happen back then when we first released it. I may not be a Rocket, but I'm lucky enough to work very closely with these ladies six days a week. I've been Santa Claus in the Christmas spectacular for the past four years.

• 46:45Josh Clark?

  Neat.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  To say these women are the greatest stage athletes would be an understatement. Not only are they the best in their field, but even offstage, they are gracious, intelligent individuals, and many have other unique passions outside of dance. This year is quite special as it marks the 100th anniversary of the Rockettes. Not the Christmas spectacular, that'll be in 2033. But if you guys want to come see a show, let me know. I'll give you my Santa schedule and get you some tickets. My wife and I, Mrs. Claus, adore Stuff You Should Know, and we're at your last New York City live show. Thanks for everything. And that is from Santa Claus, Adam.

• 47:24Josh Clark?

  That's sweet. Thank you, Santa.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Adam.

• 47:26Josh Clark?

  That was a really great one. And thanks for the offer too. We're gonna have to take him up on it, Chuck.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  I've always wanted to see that show, so maybe, maybe we'll do that one day.

• 47:34Josh Clark?

  That's pretty great. Thanks again, Santa. And before we sign off, Chuck, this episode comes out on Yumi's birthday, so I want to say happy birthday, Yumi.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  When's your birthday?

• 47:44Josh Clark?

  The 30th.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Ah, I thought it was the 31st.

• 47:47Josh Clark?

  No.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  No wonder I'm always a day late.

• 47:51Josh Clark?

  But you're not a dollar short, Chuck. You always come through.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  All right. Well, happy birthday, Yumi.

• 47:55Josh Clark?

  Thanks. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Santa did, you can send us an email too at [email protected].

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 48:21Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 48:53Speaker 09

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 49:06Speaker 10

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,

• 49:50Speaker 10

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.