Photo illustration The Globe and Mail/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.
Raising kids is full of moments that feel like victories wrapped in defeats – such as when your teenaged sons announce they’re going to make their own lunch, and then produce a box of Kraft Dinner, boil the too-small pot over, decant half the fluorescent orange cheese product down the crack between the stove and the counter, smother the meal in ketchup and complete it with a box of singly wrapped Bear Paws cookies.
So much for the countless lessons you’ve offered over the years on basic nutrition, processed versus real food and packaging waste.
Help may be coming. This spring, the Ontario Ministry of Education announced that it would be overhauling its secondary-school diploma requirements in an effort to ensure that students are “better prepared for life beyond the classroom,” as the ministry press release put it. Among the proposed changes: a mandatory financial-literacy component, a “revitalization” of guidance and career education, and the reintroduction of home economics.
Home economics. For many, the term will connote noodle casseroles and homemade pincushions that wallowed in the back of their mother’s sock drawer. The subject has a long history in Canadian classrooms, originally geared to girls as future housekeepers, schooling them in the fine arts of household science – “Cookery, Hygiene, Household Emergencies, Bacteriology, Sewing and Handicrafts,” as an Ontario Department of Education bulletin from 1912 described it. The postwar boom prompted a shift toward economic savvy – shopping-cart know-how and the ins and outs of home ownership, including decorating and renovating – and by the 1980s, the subject (often referred to as “home ec”) had been rebranded Family Studies in an effort to pitch it to both genders. Once a standard offering in most schools, the course has been largely phased out, although aspects of it – such as nutrition and health – are taught in physical education at the elementary level and optional courses such as fashion arts, food sciences and technological education are offered in some high schools.
So what would a modernized home-economics course look like in this day and age? And should it be mandatory? The ministry plans to hold public consultations on that very question this fall. For now, it is referring to “life skills like nutritious cooking, changing a tire, sewing a button, using first aid, personal responsibility and basic economics.”
If this is home economics, bring it on. Now more than ever, kids need to learn how to cook, fix and make things. The world they’re growing up in has put convenience and instantaneity ahead of these basic life skills: Prepared meals come out of the deep freeze, Amazon parcels arrive at the front door, and the dollar store provides an endless supply of cheap, replaceable goods. It’s not a good way of living, for us or the planet.
Canadians are the fourth-largest consumers of ultraprocessed food globally, a habit associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, which now affects a third of Canadians. Nearly seven million people in this country are food-insecure. At the same time, we rank as one of the world’s most wasteful populations, throwing out some 2.33 kilograms of municipal solid waste – everyday things, including electronics and food – per capita a day.
A mandatory home-economics course could help buck these trends and empower young Canadians to feed, clothe and provision themselves in ways that are healthy and sustainable. They also need the knowledge to shop wisely and not fall prey to the marketing trickery that infiltrates their social-media feeds.
“Students like fast fashion because it’s cheap,” says Theresa Aqui, a teacher of home economics at York Memorial Collegiate Institute in Toronto. “They have no idea what happens to clothes when they throw them out – nor do most adults, for that matter.”
Ms. Aqui’s first career was in clothing production, but she became disillusioned with the industry’s exploitation of cheap labour and wasted resources. She is now president of the Ontario Family Studies Home Economics Educators’ Association, an organization founded in 1903 by educational reformer Adelaide Hoodless, who, after losing her newborn son to food-borne illness, authored Public School Domestic Science, which became a mandatory text in Ontario high schools. Like the reformer before her, Ms. Aqui sees home economics not as a matter of hobbies, but of public health and social justice. “It’s actually about equity,” she says. “About protecting kids from food insecurity and teaching them to make good consumer decisions.”
It’s also about levelling a playing field that remains stubbornly gendered. While Canadian women’s participation in the work force has steadily risen over the past half-century, we continue to shoulder the lion’s share of unpaid domestic work: an average of 36 more minutes a day than men, according to Statistics Canada figures from 2015. Men stepped up during the pandemic lockdowns, but it was mainly in the areas where they have traditionally reigned: the garden, the garage and the ledgers. A 2021 survey of Canadian couples’ division of domestic labour during lockdowns found that the routine, repetitive tasks – cleaning, cooking, laundry – continued to fall primarily to women.
That’s fine if it’s how couples want it, but not if it’s because half of the population claims to be unfit for these tasks. As a single mother of two boys, I can tolerate “I don’t want to” when it comes to doing dishes, folding laundry or chopping onions. What I don’t ever want to hear is “But that’s not my job.”
Justin Gabinet, a home-economics teacher in Sherwood Park, Alta., wants to turn some of these norms on their head. Growing up in a large Polish-Ukrainian family, he started cooking with his grandmother at the age of 6. The courses he now teaches cover food science, safety, history and nutrition. Nothing makes him happier than students e-mailing him over the holidays, asking to be reminded how to roast a chicken.
“It makes no sense,” he says. “Most celebrity chefs are men, but women do the domestic stuff.”
Mr. Gabinet has received professional accreditation as a home economist from the Alberta Human Ecology and Home Economics Association and wears the ring conferred on him with pride, hoping to entice more men into a field still dominated by women. He sees cooking as a vital life skill that fewer students are learning at home, with working parents already stretched thin.
“In 30 years, most people will have forgotten trigonometry,” he says, “but they’ll still need to know how to feed themselves.”
There is no mandatory home-economics credit in Alberta, but interest in the subject is growing as the provincial government introduces more trades training at the high-school level and goes back to building schools with cooking and textile labs, many of which were converted into computer labs in the past two decades. Similarly, the Ontario government – facing a major labour shortage in the skilled trades – has introduced a mandatory “technological education” credit at the high-school level this year, insisting that students take at least one course focused on hands-on learning and technical skills.
I’d like to think that the renewed interest in home economics is part of an overall reconsideration of the role of technology in schools. In the past year, several provinces have woken up to the damage caused by cellphones in schools and announced policies to crack down on their use. In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government is framing the changes to the high-school diploma requirements as part of a “back-to-basics” program that has included the reintroduction of cursive writing, which was turfed from the curriculum in 2006.
These are welcome developments. For too long, educators have embraced digital technologies and lost sight of the fundamental learning and developmental skills that these devices displace. When my son was in Grade 4, his teacher told me not to worry about his handwriting – which looked like hieroglyphics and cost him a full-body effort to produce – because the school would soon be offering him a voice-to-text device. The occupational therapist we opted for instead said that her workload had exploded in recent years with students struggling to hold pencils, operate scissors and manage paper clips – a decline in basic fine motor skills she attributed to the increased prevalence of screens.
The re-engagement of hands is an important corrective. Neuroscience has long since established the direct correlation between the act of handwriting and brain development, one that is not duplicated with keyboarding. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, but hands that make and fix things contribute beauty and utility to the world. This year, my son took an unexpected pride in the output of his Grade 10 ceramics class, as an extraordinary collection of vases, boxes, bowls and unnameable objets entered our home.
“One of the things I love most about teaching food courses is the different kinds of interactions you see between students,” Mr. Gabinet says. “Suddenly some of the less academic kids have more authority, and the more academic kids find themselves doing things they really enjoy.”
Enjoyment of school is important – and so too is survival after it. A home-economics class that teaches kids the fundamentals of life beyond the parental nest will make for healthier and more resilient adults. If these courses are well resourced and taught by passionate educators, they can’t come soon enough.