> No girl graduated high school without knowing how to bake, budget, and sew, while her male counterpart took classes in autoshop and woodworking
> This all changed in the 1960s. For good reasons, second-wave feminists fought back against the rigid gender stereotypes of the previous decade and felt that mandatory home economic classes were pushing women into the confinement of housewifery
I understand the idea but no, it is not good. Women used to know how to cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that. The man/woman distinction was kind of arbitrary but it resulted in useful complementary skills.
Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator. Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
> Women used to know cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that.
No, it didn't.
One, because while it may have been required for graduation from high school (most of the described material was not, in most places, anyway, though it was traditional and common, and, even where it was required at one point, it remained traditional and common decades beyond the 1960s), graduation rates have always been substantially below 100% (especially before the change in the 1960s), and second because not all households, even in and before the 1960s, consisted of at least one adult of each gender.
The only way to assure that households have a particular combination of skills is to assure that individuals, regardless of gender, have that combination of skills.
> Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator.
No, we didn't; there is a lot more required in high school today than there was in the 1960s; shop and home ec became less common not because gender roles weakened (that just made both more gender mixed, especially the traditionally male classes), but because they were displaced as academic core requirements got more involved.
> Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
The reason is because they are capital intensive, liability intensive, there's less interest in them if offered as electives because the relative economic value of the skills and the relative social status of practitioners of them has declined, and there's no room without displacing something seen as more valuable to fit them in as universal requirements.
Households on average certainly seem to outsource more and be capable of less of the core “upkeep” tasks than in the past. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, plumbing, electrical, auto, etc.
We absolutely lose out on these skills in aggregate, by pulling them from the curriculum, and it’s also not obvious at all that there is less overal economic value to providing some hands-on tradecraft skills (which often require critical thinking and creative problem solving) versus another theoretical academic course.
The amount of money an average household can save through doing their own home maintenance and upkeep is substantial, and the opportunity cost is not as high as you might think. These activities often have positive externalities (the additional learning that takes place while doing them, or the opportunity of doing them with the kids), not to mention emotional payback. And the cost of outsourcing these jobs is almost always not tax-deductible, making the true cost of outsourcing nearly double the sticker price.
Of course the problem is that at face value those academic classes seem more interesting, seem to have better ROI-for-life, and obviously you are quite right that a lot of people would be better off were they able to do basic upkeep, budgeting, woodwork, plumbing, wiring a socket, or simply knowing how to paint a room, and also you are correct that sometimes these activities lead to insights into problem solving, and some addition to critical thinking skills.
But in reality most of school is about developing interpersonal skills and having time to do whatever really interests you, and teaching applied rationality is hard, and only occasional in every class, be it DIY, physics, debate club, or free form project.
> Households on average certainly seem to outsource more and be capable of less of the core “upkeep” tasks than in the past.
While it's usually thought of on a national level, Ricardian comparative advantage works at the household level, and as markets have less overhead in the form of financial and other (e.g., delay) costs, outsourcing more tasks where the household doesn't have comparative advantage is expected. If you don't want these tasks outsourced, you either need to make a nation of professional woodworkers and seamstresses somehow or, more plausibly, artificially increase transaction costs of outsourcing, e.g., by targeted taxes.
> And the cost of outsourcing these jobs is almost always not tax-deductible, making the true cost of outsourcing nearly double the sticker price.
That's a bizarre claim. If it's not tax deductible, the cost is exactly the sticker price. If it is tax deductible, it's less than the sticker price by the marginal rate of income tax paid by the purchaser, so even if it weren't unreasonable to treat the tax deductible case as the baseline car, you'd need a 50% marginal income tax rate to make the non-deductible cost the twice the deductible cost.
You can get this in the top bracket in CA, but that's a pretty narrow elite.
The article also mention how the economic value of woodworking and mending has sharply dropped since the 1960, but I disagree on that when it comes to cooking. The article does not talk about it since it is focused on mending, but food cost are often second highest portion of a individuals monthly budget after rent. In households economics, cooking your own food can easily become one the single biggest savings a person can do. If the article is right that home economics is deincentivized because of politics then that kind of politics are contributing to increased poverty, worse health and harm to the environment. The ability to feed themselves should be an essential skill all individuals should have from basic education, similar to that of knowing how the government work or what basic physical training look like.
>"Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget."
Gender issues not withstanding, you're absolutely correct, the tragedy is that very few people of either gender know to do these skills today and it's resulted in some very negative consequences.
As I've pointed out in a rather long post below, we desperately need to regain many of them and there's multiple good reasons why we should do so ASAP.
Carry that to the extreme and why bother having school at all? I'm all for a lot of classical curriculum components. But I also think that there is a huge amount of value to exposing high schoolers to hands-on activities that are both practical and potentially rather enjoyable. This includes electronics and so forth by the way. But it might also include sewing.
What about social engineering and distractions? Even ancient Rome used this technique—take the Colosseum for instance. The problem is that in recent years our culture has be stuffed up by vested interests (and IT and the internet hasn't helped here either).
You're so, so right. It's an ecological disaster in the making, and by repairing things we essentially deskill the citizenry—we've far fewer repairers and tradespeople nowadays—and we concentrate knowledge in the hands of large multinationals (at expense of information being open to everyone). Take John Deere's proprietary tractors or Apple proprietary iPhone for instance—no one is allowed to repair them except those authorized by these manufacturers.
It's a damned disgrace. No wonder there's 'Right to Repair' movements starting up everywhere. They need our full support.
Gender is not the problem. I think this is a unfortunate mix-up.
Furniture (products of woodwork) and fashion are super cheap nowadays, so the rent of mending is diminished. I can spend 20 minutes on fixing a shirt before it is financially rational to just buy a new one.
Cars and some other things are just very complicated thanks to closed and obscured software.
My girlfriend just recently fixed our LP player (both 25 years old ;) ), I tried to fix a 5 year old CD player .. not a chance.
> I can spend 20 minutes on fixing a shirt before it is financially rational to just buy a new one.
If it were produced from sustainable materials and labor, and you had to pay the rent for the landfill space it occupies until it biodegrades, and you made an average income, the cost would work out in favor of mending.
Disposable goods are a high rent that we pay almost exclusively to the mega-rich and subsidize for ourselves by externalizing much of the cost onto underrepresented labor groups, like developing markets and future generations that will inherit our landfills.
I think your drastically overestimating the cost of landfill space, and t-shirts. A middle class american's time is worth at least 20$/hr, a t-shirt costs $2 to make from scratch in a factory and the landfill volume of that shirt might round up to a penny.
Disposable goods are disposable because people tend to act rationally about time and costs.
We had cooking, sewing, metalworking, and woodworking classes in middle school, mandatory for all genders. Auto shop was a high school class and it was optional. And I went to a very subpar poor school.
> Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
I did take both? At a standard public school in Canada.
I think it depends on jurisdiction, and I'd guess if those classes aren't provided, it's more likely because they're more expensive to teach (sewing machines, cook surfaces, woodworking tools are all very expensive).
> This all changed in the 1960s. For good reasons, second-wave feminists fought back against the rigid gender stereotypes of the previous decade and felt that mandatory home economic classes were pushing women into the confinement of housewifery
I understand the idea but no, it is not good. Women used to know how to cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that. The man/woman distinction was kind of arbitrary but it resulted in useful complementary skills.
Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator. Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?