ONE-WEEK COURSES IN HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.
It is for adults that the United States Government issues such bulletins as “Modern Conveniences for the Farm Home.” It is for adults that Cornell University sends out its Farmers’ Wives’ Bulletins in editions of twenty thousand. It is for adults that Columbia University prints pamphlets like “The Feeding of 129 Children in a Family with an Income of $800 a Year.”
For adults, again, are such institutions as the American School of Home Economics, in Chicago, which, in the few years of its life, has enrolled more than 10,000 pupils in its correspondence courses.
For adults, finally, are the Homemakers’ Conferences held in conjunction with Farmers’ Institutes as well as the extension-course lectures given to local groups in city and in country by teachers sent out from state universities and agricultural colleges.
All this machinery, which here we do not attempt to describe but only to indicate, will some day find its scattered units associated and harmonized through the work of a Federal Bureau of Domestic Science and Art. Bills for the establishment of such a bureau have already been introduced into Congress. It will not be a cooking and sewing school for children. It will be a technical continuation school for adults. The National Congress of Mothers discerned one of its functions when it said: “The time has come when every nation through a 130 special department should provide data concerning infants which may be used by mothers everywhere.”
At the end of chapter two of this book we asked whether or not, in the field of education, the training for the home and the training for self-support would impose a double burden on the girl pupil. If our interpretation of the spirit of the home economics movement has been correct we may now say that the training for the home is so largely a training for life in general and is so distributed through different life-periods that it will not be felt to be burdensome at all. We may even go on to suggest that self-support and housekeeping, world and home, and the trainings for them, will merge for the girl into a progressive unified experience.
First. That part of home economics which can profitably be taught to the mass of pupils in elementary and high school and in the colleges, with its manual arts, its Right Living and its money-sense, will be helpful, much of it, to boys as well as to girls and will actually, since it develops the whole personality of the pupil, be part of the training for self-support itself.