When I was a kid, cooking was part of the "Home Economics" class, which also included budgeting, shopping, basic repairs (home, clothing, etc), and some other useful "adulting" skills they apparently don't teach in school anymore.
I think about how great my home economics class was. I still think of my teacher decades later. All that she taught me (I took several of her classes). From grocery shopping trips, food inspection, food preparation & safety, sewing, how to inspect clothing for quality, basic home maintenance... like, so much stuff that has been more impactful in my life than any other thing. I'm sad to think that my teacher is probably no longer alive after all these years. She also encouraged the hell out of me to play the guitar, which I still do. Cheers to you, Marlene. I'm sorry for those days where I might have been a bit of a pain, but I was just a young one then.
It's at least partly because, starting with NCLB in 2001, schools got defunded if students didn't do well on standardized tests. That resulted in curricula being redesigned around those standardized tests, and in an even more exaggerated way for obvious reasons in poor schools.
Late 40s here. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to take home ec - the school considered it beneath me. Latin was thrust upon me as my senior year elective. And I still can’t bake a souflee to save myself.
I found that in ethics classes, a lot of it was holier than thou and virtue signaling instructors preaching but not necessarily practicing. I am not saying all of the instructors and people who teach ethics are bad, this is what I have observed.
This is interesting to me, none of the ethics classes I've ever taken even had room for a holier-than-thou instructor; they were taught as "here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time".
A professor saying "And I'm great at doing the right thing" would be as out of place as them bragging about their fitness or wealth.
I remember my equivalent (they called it "Commerce" but it was basically law/politics/ethics) spent some significant time navel gazing at legislation that had directly influenced the private school system we were in.
"here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time" would have been vastly preferable to "heres how private schools with private funding successfully managed to extort the government for even more funding"
Maybe you can consider the teacher to be good because I remember the (many, many) lessons on the topic.
That was my experience as well. OTOH I don’t think ethics classes will magically make the students “more ethical” or something. Might as well let students have a choice of philosophy electives if possible, I don’t think making everyone take ethics is better than making everyone take aesthetics.
Although if you were going to have something more concrete, like Engineering Ethics except somehow for high schoolers without a particular career chosen, a few weeks of philosophy would probably be good background.
