Home Economics Should Be Brought Back

With technology providing more conveniences than ever, and making it easier to lead more comfortable lives, it is not surprising that the rates of people who don’t know how to cook are rising. This new era of technology has made it so that everyone is plunged into fast-paced lives leaving no room for activities that require time and effort such as cooking. Studies have shown that the number of people going to restaurants and eating take-out from fast food chains are increasing at a fast pace. Fewer and fewer people are spending money on groceries and the amount of people eating in their own homes are decreasing.
Because of this new time-consuming life, we need a class like Home Economics back in the curriculum more than ever.
Although there has been a lot of data that states that young people want to know how to cook, they are stopped from doing so because most don’t have the time to learn the skill. For example, a 2014 poll found that half of adults felt that they had fewer meals with their families now than when they were kids. It is much easier to go to sleep, surf the Internet, or watch TV rather than spend at least an hour waiting for chicken to marinate.
Because of this new time-consuming life, we need a class like Home Economics back in the curriculum more than ever.
Home Economics is a course that used to be integrated into the school system. The course taught students basic life-skills like cooking, maintaining a budget, and sewing.
Now that people don’t have the same amount of time to spend on learning things like cooking, it is important to introduce these basic life-skills at an early age.
People can argue that these skills aren’t supposed to be learned at school and that it would be much easier if parents would teach these types of skills at home. At the same time, however, most parents don’t have the time after work to help their kids learn how to cook.
High school or junior high is the perfect time for teaching students basic life-skills, because it’s at that time where kids are transitioning into becoming adults who will need to learn how to be independent, and what it’s like to balance a budget and buy groceries. It’s better to start instilling these skills at an early age so that the process can start much earlier.
As a child, I would catch glimpses of the process of cooking through watching my dad or mom cooking in the kitchen. I would see how they cooked eggs or make more difficult dishes such as pasta. However, these small glimpses weren’t enough. I still didn’t know that in order to make a good meal, one has to have the right ingredients. I didn’t know that cooking a meal was more than chopping up lettuce and pouring it into a pan. In order to become a good cook, one needs to go through experience and invest time and effort into learning the core skills. However, in this day and age, the process is much more difficult with the time-consumption. If we introduce this type of learning at an early age, it is much better for teenagers because they are exposed to the process at a much better time.