The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the teaching of thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art and science of consumption is concerned with wise spending, the bulk of its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes. It will not be, to any great extent, a specialized education for women.
So much for the “money sense in expenditure” which a full home economics course adds to “academic” education. The more we admit its value, the more convinced we must be that 118 it ought to include every kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.
A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those “domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences” which a full home economics course adds to an “academic” education.
Those “domestic” applications are most of them broadly “human” applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air, personal cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion, methods of fighting off disease, general physical efficiency. They largely amount to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards used to call Right Living. She wanted four R’s instead of three: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, Right Living.
Now is Right Living to be only for girls?
Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent “Survey of the Needs of Education,” he said:
“Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all schools.... To make this new knowledge and 119 skill a universal subject of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no means impossible—indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a subject full of natural history as well as social interest.... American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction on public and private hygiene, diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because they are of high economic importance.”
It may very well be that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come to pass but will even exceed his expectations. It may very well be that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she said:
“We need to have courage to break the present courses in household arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea would be this: that 120 instruction in the facts of daily living be incorporated in the state’s educational system from the primary grades through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank equal to that of any subject that is taught, as required work for both boys and girls.”
We revert now finally to the “manual arts” which a full course in home economics adds to an “academic” education. In this matter, just as in the matter of money sense in expenditure and in the matter of right living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in the common things of life for men and women both.