Transcript

What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 41 min · 7,798 words · 124 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published December 31, 2025 (41 min, about 7,798 words). It mentions 43 people, works and ideas, including Bureau of Home Economics, MIT, General Mills, Campbell, Smith–Hughes Act.

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the decline of home economics classes in education, reflecting on their impact on practical life skills and social dynamics in schools. It emphasizes the importance of these courses in teaching essential skills, such as cooking and budgeting, and examines the cultural shifts that have led to their fading presence in modern curricula.

Key takeaways

  • Home economics: Once vital for life skills, now sidelined; Gen Z's kryptonite might be baking without TikTok tutorials.
  • Despite feminism debates, home ec pioneered women in science, proving cake recipes can fuel rocket engineering.
  • From farm to classroom: Home ec transformed domestic 'terrors' into efficiency, all while keeping tricornered hats trendy.
  • In the UK, 'food sciences' reigns supreme; across the pond, we've mastered balancing checkbooks and jello.
  • Filled sinks with cement—who knew home classes could spark a 'cement glass' revolution? Efficiency meets hard lessons.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Buckhead, food science
  2. – 10:00: Ellen Swallow Richards, Nancy Darling, tailorism
  3. – 15:00: American Home Economics Association, Bureau of Home Economics, consumer protection, environmental protection
  4. – 20:00: Bureau of Home Economics, Campbell, General Mills, Beef Finkelestein
  5. – 25:00: Baby Think It Over, The Secret History of Home Economics
  6. – 30:00: Cameron LeBlanc, family and consumer sciences, Fatherly, No Child Left Behind Act
  7. – 40:30: Apple Podcast

Notable quotes from "What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

  • Yeah. Yeah. In the old Buckhead office.
    about Buckhead · at
  • Statistics and as we'll see you know plenty of science careers came out of home economics and food science because it is a science right and that was actually one of the initial points of But if you were a homec proponent and.
    about food science · at
  • I suspect and I'm pretty sure we talked about it that this all grew out of tailorism, that obsession with getting things as efficient as possible.
    about tailorism · at
  • Yeah. And initially it was not in high school. It was a college level thing. And there is a PhD named Nancy Darling who kind of backs up this idea that it was a feminist…
    about Nancy Darling · at
  • Quality and air quality tests like essentially the foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection too. That's what this lab was doing. And the reason why you…
    about consumer protection · at
  • Starting to take off. And by the 1920s, the USDA, the Department of Agriculture had created the Bureau of Home Economics. And when you create a bureau dedicated to a new field…
    about Bureau of Home Economics · at
  • Have like household tips and recipes and stuff like that. a lot of the brands got in the game. General Mills and Betty Crocker, Cooking School of the Air. it's another radio…
    about General Mills · at
  • Recipes that you find on like a food label, one of the most famous ones is Campbell's cream of mushroom soup labels have a cream bean casserole recipe and it that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's Dorcas Riley.
    about Campbell · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Nancy Darling — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Ellen Swallow Richards — Person · 1 mention · first at
    That we'll cover for sure. But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to is Ellen Swallow Richards who's probably the most important person in the history or the…
  • Beef Finkelestein — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Something like that, you can thank home economics and science for that because a woman named Beef Finkelestein, great name, she was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury project, which is pretty great.
  • Mildred Day — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. if you love rice krispie treats, you can thank the home economics program and Matila Jensen and Mildred Day at Kelloggs there for that. and Checkexmix. This wasn't an…
  • Cameron LeBlanc — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. And there was an article on fatherly written by a guy named Cameron Leblanc and he traced it back even further. He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the vocational and technical a.
  • Danielle Dreilinger — Person · 1 mention
  • Dorcas Reilly — Person · 1 mention
  • Malitta Jensen — Person · 1 mention
  • Molly Orshansky — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Bureau of Home Economics — Company · 3 mentions · first at
  • MIT — Company · 3 mentions
  • General Mills — Company · 2 mentions · first at
  • Campbell — Company · 2 mentions · first at
  • American Home Economics Association — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah, for sure. and then in 1908 at that same conference, the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the American Home Economics Association really got the ball rolling and then…
  • Housekeepers Chat — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Thing. the Bureau of Home Economics in the 20s had a show called Housekeepers Chat that ran for a couple of decades, started in 1926. not Uncle Sam, but Aunt Sammy was the host…
  • Betty Crocker — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Cooking School of the Air — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Fatherly — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah. And there was an article on fatherly written by a guy named Cameron Leblanc and he traced it back even further. He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the vocational and technical a.
  • Apple Podcast — Company · 1 mention · first at
    IHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
  • Kellogg Company — Company · 1 mention
  • Vassar College — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Recipes that you find on like a food label, one of the most famous ones is Campbell's cream of mushroom soup labels have a cream bean casserole recipe and it that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's Dorcas Riley.
  • Chex Mix — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Did your family make Chex Mix around the holidays back then?
  • Baby Think It Over — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Well, I mean one of them in the 90s they came along with a more of a like a baby simulator. It was called Baby Think It Over. I mean they flat out said it at that point.
  • Chex — Product · 1 mention
  • Rice Krispies Treats — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

  • Smith–Hughes Act — Concept · 2 mentions
  • food science — Concept · 1 mention · first at
  • tailorism — Concept · 1 mention · first at
  • consumer protection — Concept · 1 mention · first at
  • environmental protection — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Quality and air quality tests like essentially the foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection too. That's what this lab was doing. And the reason why you…
  • Lake Placid Conferences — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Starting to become a movement and they had a series of conferences called the Lake Placid Conferences starting right at the turn of the century. And at one of these meetings…
  • federal poverty line — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied that by three and they came up with the federal poverty line that's still in use today.
  • Mercury project — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Finkelestein, great name, she was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury project, which is pretty great.
  • No Child Left Behind Act — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    States really got into standardized testing which came along mostly with the No Child Left Behind Act because all of a sudden a school's funding was tied to test scores and if…
  • Vocational Education Act of 1963 — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Was, sort of symbolic of a woman's confinement to the home in the kitchen. the vocational education act of 1963 all of a sudden gutted or at least reduced funding that Smith's Hughes act had brought about.
  • family and consumer sciences — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Home still kind of stayed around. It saw the writing on the wall but it rebranded itself as family and consumer sciences. But I think because homecck just had such a folksy…
  • Artificial Intelligence — Concept · 1 mention
  • Morrill Act of 1862 — Concept · 1 mention
  • second-wave feminism — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's us today. We got our aprons on. We have our spatulas in hand. We've been spanking each other with them. And it's time to go to class with stuff you should know.

Hey everybody. Uh just so you know, there's construction happening next door. So if you hear a saw or a hammer banging, it's not me.

No, it's not Chuck. Sometimes you just got to live with the sounds of life. Yeah. I mean, we recorded for a while and uh every time we recorded a fire truck would go by, like clockwork. Do you remember?

Yeah. Yeah. In the old Buckhead office. There was I think we were near a fire station.

Yeah. But it was like the exact same time. It was really bizarre. It was the radio lab guys pulling fire alarms all over Atlanta.

Uh, so Chuck, we're talking about homec today. Did you ever take a home class? I sure did, buddy. How about you?

I did. Um, I have very vague recollections of it. I remember the room and everything, but I don't remember anything I did. It's also possible I'm conflating it with an episode of Save by the Bell.

Yeah. Uh, yeah. I took it, you know, we had the full kitchen situation in our high school.

Mhm. uh back then and I took it because I don't know why I think I needed an elective and you know I knew there'd be cute girls in there and maybe maybe I had a friend or two that took it was probably my reasoning.

I could see that. I think both of us are the types of dudes who would not have been like I can't take home. I'm a boy.

Yeah. No, of course not. And there were plenty of dudes in the class. Yeah. Yeah. Because Gen X is enlightened.

That's right. Um, the thing is is we were really in the minority though. All the dudes in your class were in the minority. That from what I read, that was pretty uncommon even even at that time. And we were among like the last age group who could elect for homec um pretty much across the country. Like this was a time this was about the end of the time where you could find a homec classroom in most high schools or middle schools, but that is not the case anymore. Although it's still around, it's just not everywhere like it used to be.

Yeah. And in fact, I can confirm when I went back to my high school a couple of years ago when they had me back to talk to students as a, you know, interesting professional.

I remember that. Yeah, it was fun. I I took a walk around and I even remember going by where the home room was and it was definitely not the kitchen anymore.

No, I remember you told me they filled in all the sinks with cement. Yeah, it was called the cement glass. So, uh, that class would get really boring really fast.

Yeah, we should probably say HOME stands for home economics just in case that's foreign to your tongue.

True, true. Um, I understand that it's called home or home economics in Australia and I think maybe Canada and in the UK they call it food sciences I think.

Yeah, it's all the same thing. And essentially what it is, for those of you who don't know, it was a class uh in high school um where you would learn basic life skills that had a lot to do with being at home. You would learn sewing, you would learn to bake a cake, um as time wore on, you would learn to take care of a child, um maybe learn to to balance a checkbook, just basic life skills as a class in high school or middle school. And that is, it turns out, I didn't quite realize the extent of home. Um, one little slice of the whole home pie, which is delicious because it was made by home economists.

That's right. Um, and there's a whole history to it. And it's actually pretty feminist in nature too.

Yeah. You know, as we'll see, there was a bit of a pushpull at a at a certain time. And uh, which wave of feminism would that have been?

The dose. The dose. Uh, yeah. where you know there were certain people saying like no this is you know you shouldn't be teaching women to stay at home and stay in the kitchen and other people are like we're not teaching them saying you have to do that but we're saying you know there are viable careers that you can gain and you know industrial engineering and um statistics and as we'll see you know plenty of of science careers came out of home economics and food science because it is a science

right and that was actually one of the initial points of But if you were a homec proponent and you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying, "Let me give you a little picture of what life used to be like for the average woman in the United States before we came along." And you would start in about the 19th century. They run the turn of it. So they were still wearing triccornered hats, but they were looking forward to trains.

Mhm. Um, and if you were a farm woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone.

Yeah. I mean, what we know as home was not early home because early home was like you might have seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm and you might have farm hands that you also have to kind of care for and feed. So, you're feeding these huge families

uh from stuff that you're growing probably on your land and processing and canning and churning butter and you're handmaking clothes and doing laundry by hand and it's it's it's a lot.

Yeah. And like you would say that that's not even home economics. That's just home terribleness, right? Yeah.

When home economics came along, it was based on this idea that okay, all of these people are working really hard. There has to be ways to improve this to make it more efficient. Yeah,

I I suspect and I'm pretty sure we talked about it that this all grew out of tailorism, that um obsession with getting things as efficient as possible.

Um and I think that that kind of grew out of that same vein. And there were actually a few things that kind of came together to to make um the fertile soil that Homeck grew from. One of them, the big one was literacy started to spread in the the mid-9th century. And so when lit literacy spread, you got more books and home like domestic tips and householding was a whole genre of books. So were cookbooks. And then part and parcel of that was this kind of the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women can be educated too, but just in women's stuff.

Yeah, for sure. And you know the books were important because previous to that it was everything was sort of handed down from uh you know parent to child as far as any kind of wisdom goes about how to do anything

right? So if you had books and you had classes you didn't depend on like your grandmother necessarily being good at you know baking a cake or something like that.

Like what if your grandmother was a dipstick right? Yeah. Exactly. So cooking schools also emerged and this was important because your grandmother might also in addition to being a dipstick might not have been that great of a cook. Now there's a place you can go to learn to cook well and nutritiously. That was a big one too. And then also this was a new career path that a woman could take to become a cook and like say a wealthy household. So they were training now people to work outside of the house doing domestic stuff.

Yeah, for sure. Uh and then one of the biggest ones was the the Maril Act of 1862 and that's when land grant colleges were established and all of a sudden there were schools that said hey maybe we should offer you know it was kind of the beginnings of trade schools like you know teach people how to work in a agriculture uh and industry and things like that and not necessarily just sit around with your nose in the air reading the classics.

Exactly. and women were open uh or these colleges were open to women as well too. So these three things come together and um one of the other reasons that really made homec kind of come to life start sprouting from that fertile soil was the transition that America was going through with industrialization. All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to do things like you were in the city now surrounded by people you've not really ever met before with a husband who now works in the factory rather than the farm. And you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing. And so, HomeK kind of came in to fill that break that had happened, that intergenerational passage of knowledge from mother to daughter. Um, HomeK said, "Hey, forget mothers. we're gonna tell you how to do this and we're going to tell you how to do it better. They didn't really say forget mothers. That

wasn't the sentiment. That was me being a smart alec. Yeah. And you know, initially it was not in high school. It was a college level thing. And there is a a PhD named Nancy Darling who kind of backs up this idea that it was a feminist movement to begin with. Uh with this quote, she said it developed home that is uh from something radical. the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful, and and here's the key for me, uh, economically significant. And it was economics. They didn't just call it that to make it seem fancy.

Um, the the running of a household is is big- time economics. And if you're not good at that,

uh, as we'll see with, you know, younger generations, uh, it can spell trouble.

For sure. Yeah. Yeah. For Yeah. There's a whole a whole wash out that's happened that we'll cover for sure. But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to is Ellen Swallow Richards who's probably the most important person in the history or the early history at least of home economics. No, let's just say it, the entire history of home economics. She was a pretty impressive sort. She um studied chemistry. She got a bachelor's and a master's from Vasser and then became the first woman to get a degree from MIT and then became the first woman instructor at MIT and set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only. And this was not really domestic work. It was figuring out water quality and air quality tests like essentially the the foundations of um environmental protection and um consumer protection too. That's what this lab was doing. And the reason why you associated with homech is because one of the

reasons homech existed also you said that it started at the college level was as a way for women almost a backdoor a workaround a loophole for women to become scientists it was okay as long as there was enough of a whiff of women's work like clean water that's woman's work um that that academia could put up with it that was one of the big ways homeck started funneling women into education and into the sciences.

Yeah. I mean, she was trying to improve uh the United States and she thought and she was, you know, right on the money. She was like, if I'm going to try to improve, you know, the United States and civilization, then I'm I have to start at what what she considered and, you know, I think most people agree is the basic unit, which is a family, the family unit. And if I can each h if I can get each household one at a time to practice, you know, more efficient practices, more sanitary practices, safer practices, you know, where you're not, you know, burning kitchens down and things like that,

right? Then it'll, you know, all boats will rise and it started to become a movement. And, you know, this is like the the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Yeah. And remember also there's a big emphasis on this work is important. like this is unpaid labor but it produces a lot of dividends for any family and hence building upward um for civilization for a nation civilization all that. So, like you said, this is starting to become a movement and they had a series of conferences called the Lake Placid Conferences starting right at the turn of the century. And at one of these meetings, they chose the term home economics, like you said, to basically point out, not to kind of latch their field on economics, to point out that domestic work was a um huge part of economics. And up to this point, um economists had basically just been looking at production. they weren't looking at the um demand side and what one of the things homec introduced was the idea of um consumer sciences like studying consumption as well as part of the larger economy which is you can't do

economics without that now but that's what one of the things homec introduced yeah and they and they came up with the name home at one of those conferences after debating domestic science and they said no uh that that doesn't sound like it's studying consumerism that's a part of this.

I think household arts was put forward and they said, "No, that sounds too artsy fartsy and not academic enough." So, they landed on home economics. Uh, and and an ironic twist that kind of takes it back home because the word economics or economics comes from I love this word. Uh, okonomia, okonomia, I inserted an extra eye there,

which is ancient Greek for household management. So, there you have it. Yeah, they dropped the the oldtimey mic at this point.

Yeah, for sure. Uh and then in 1908 at that same conference, uh the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the American Home Economics Association really got the ball rolling and then shortly after in 1917, the Hughes Act started funding vocational education like shop class and home and it was off to the races.

Yep. So, uh, you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, uh, like you said, HomeX starts to take off?

Let's do it. Want to learn about a terasaur and call it pterodactyl? How to take a perfect all about fractals? Gang is a hunt, the Lizzy Border Murders, and the cannibal runs.

Don't explain everything to your brain. explode. Word up, Jerry. Okay, so uh when we left off, home was starting to take off. And by the 1920s, um the USDA, the Department of Agriculture had created the Bureau of Home Economics. And when you create a bureau dedicated to a new field, that's that's when the fields arrived. If you're a band and Weird has done a cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived. If you're a field of study and someone opens a bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your field's arrived.

But it became the country's biggest employer of women scientists, which is pretty significant at the time.

That's right. Uh their mission, of course, was education. Um and it wasn't just, you know, how to cook, obviously. It was meal planning, it was budgeting. Um there was a lot of science behind it because uh they got into you know nutritional values like any you know uh nutritional um tag that you read uh and in fact any like clothing tag that you read. I'll go ahead and get ahead of that one. Um that all was born out of um the science of this new bureau that was founded. Uh they were testing mildew proofing for fabrics. they were uh servicing military service members like you know trying to come up with better things for the US military to eat and and of course school lunch programs all over the country were dependent on this science.

Yeah, this is where uh the square pizza was invented I suspect. They should have a monument to that.

Well, one of the I agree. One of the other things about that though in addition to the square pizza, the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this. The pizza, it comes from Italy. And if you've ever seen an actual like Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza. The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern Americanized much blander version of it. Although I agree with you, it's quite good. And this is where American food as we think of it today was founded. All the ethnic food got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought into the homec world and that bland Midwestern American food took over. That's where that came from.

And this also coincided with the birth of radio that we seems like we've talked a lot about that lately. But um because of that, of course, you're going to have shows on the radio about this kind of thing. Uh the Bureau of Home Economics in the 20s um had a show called Housekeepers Chat uh that ran for a couple of decades, started in 1926. Uh not Uncle Sam, but Aunt Sammy was the host of that one, or I guess not the host, but it featured her. And she would have like household tips and recipes and stuff like that. Um, a lot of the brands got in the game. Uh, General Mills and Betty Crocker, uh, Cooking School of the Air. Uh, you know, it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And again, uh, the bureau is like helping to get all of these things launched on the airwaves. Uh, one of the other examples of the what the Bureau of Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact in addition to founding um like

the the mass-roduced food movement um was they came up with the poverty line. In fact, Molly Oshansky did. She was a statistician um who studied how much a a house spent to come up with a basic nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied that by three and they came up with the federal poverty line that's still in use today.

Yeah. And if you've ever seen, you know, astronauts eating lasagna out of a what looks like a a toothpaste tube or something like that, uh you can thank home economics and science for that because uh a woman named Beef Finkelestein, great name, um she was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury project, which is pretty great.

That's right. Um, and then one of the other things that struck me too that I didn't realize was that a lot of those recipes that you find on like a a food label, one of the most famous ones is uh Campbell's cream of mushroom soup labels have a a cream bean casserole recipe and it that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's Dorcas Riley. and um she's a good example of what was happening at this time. Starting in the 20s, 30s, 40s and continuing on, these companies like General Mills and Campbell were setting up um home economics departments. And one of the things that these home economists were being paid to do was to figure out new uses for the products uh made by the companies they worked for so that people would buy more of that stuff and then they put those recipes on the label.

Yeah. I mean, if you love rice krispie treats, you can thank the home economics program uh and Matila Jensen and Mildred Day at Kelloggs there for that. and uh Checkexmix. This wasn't an sort of an internal uh team, but uh CEXMix was actually a contest and it was in I believe the 1950s uh when they just had a contest like what can you do with uh Czech cereal and someone submitted mix and like it's the same recipe basically that everyone enjoys today like all of these are.

Did Did your family make Chex Mix around the holidays back then? Not a ton. That Emily's family really did though. So she still makes, you know, that same recipe, that checks mix recipe.

It must be so hyo then cuz my family did as well. Yeah. But that's a good example of how like these companies farmed out the task of coming up with stuff because home had become so widespread. The average um homemaker out there could do the same thing in a lot of ways that some of the uh home workers working for the company could do too. I think that's pretty neat.

Talk about efficiencies. Like if if you're baking a cake from scratch or making pancakes or something like that or a gravy from scratch, uh there were women in homex uh homec departments at companies saying like, "Hey, we can make this." You know, there's a lot to do. So, what if it what if this stuff was all kind of premixed in a box and you could sell them like well, I was about to say like hot cakes. Uh and they did. And you know that this these were things that were real time savers in the kitchen

for sure. And that was the point. remember if home is saving time, being more efficient, and then as food companies were concerned, making tons of money off of this stuff, too. Um, so that's kind of going on in the corporate world, the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread of homec being taught in high school and middle school. And there was a time in the 20th century up into the 80s and 90s, um, and I'm sure beyond. Again, these these classes are still out there, but not nothing like they used to be. Um, where you could go into a high school or middle school and there was a simulated kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of different stoves and ovens and refrigerators and people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby.

Um, and in some cases taking care of a real baby, too, because this stuff got intense sometimes.

Yeah, that that baby thing. I don't remember our high school class ever delving into that. Uh I do remember the um the egg babies.

Mhm. Uh like where you would I never had to take part, but I saw other kids in school carrying around the egg and this is

sort of in the 70s and 80s. They would give you a raw egg um you know in the shell

and because some people would be like what the heck is he even talking about? Uh they would give you an egg and the whole idea was you have to care for that egg without breaking it for a couple of weeks. you got to carry this thing around. Uh it sounds easy just to not get that egg broken, but it's really not. Um you know, you have to really think ahead about everything. And that's the whole idea is that when you have a baby, you can't just make decisions on the spur of the moment. You have to kind of pre-plan everything. And the egg came along after they use real babies from orphanages.

Yeah. Apparently at some of the colleges that were teaching home, they would borrow babies from orphanages for the the um the students to just basically practice on. And apparently um there's a a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics. And she said that um for adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd show up and be like, "You got any one of them babies that's been in the home economic classes?"

Yeah, man. Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for [clears throat and snorts] just with complete attention and care by um women who were working in like the cutting edge of child rearing. So um they were much more desirable than the nonhomeck babies it turns out.

Yeah, for sure. I mean the before I even read that part of this I was thinking in my head like oh man you want that baby for sure.

For sure. Um, apparently those eggs would uh get on custodians nerves enough that they switched to flour or sugar, which also had the um added benefit of heft. And I saw in a like a some educational magazine, I can't remember, but they would um put panty hoes of different colors to simulate multicultural skin tones over the flower sugar. and that sometimes um if you forgot like your kid whether it was an egg or a sack of flour or something in your locker, you might be forced to like write a paper on child abuse or something like that. So the whole point was to just teach high school kids you don't want to have a baby at this period in your life. Maybe ever like if the class was hard enough maybe they're like I'm never having a kid but certainly not through my teen years. That was the point.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I think they kind of sold it to you as like here it'll it'll teach you like how to kind of care for a baby and how much goes into that. But what they were really saying is please don't have sex.

Kind of. Kind of. Well, I mean one of them in the 90s they came along with a more of a like a baby simulator. It was called Baby Think It Over. I mean they they flat out said it at that point.

Yeah. Uh like I think we all know what Think It Over means. Sure. And I I don't know if it worked or not, but it was a great attempt at the very least

for sure. So by the middle of the 20th century, I think 1959, half of all American girls, half of all the girls in America were taking home courses in school and then just suddenly it just dried up. It wasn't like a faucet got turned off or a light switch was turned, but it started to to go downhill pretty fast in about the early 60s. And um let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about where home went after well the break.

Want to learn about a ter and call it pterodactyl. How to take a perfect all about fractals until the hunt. The Lizzy board of murders and the cannibal runs.

Don't explain everything to your brain. explod up Jerry. All right, so home is on the decline. And there's a bunch of reasons for this uh that kind of all kind of steamrolled together at a certain point, but one of the biggest ones was when the United States really got into standardized testing uh which came along mostly with the No Child Left Behind Act because all of a sudden a school's funding was tied to test scores and uh if if there aren't any home questions on these tests uh and the testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of even teaching that stuff? Um, I don't agree with that obviously, but that was sort of the thought and so a lot of those classes started to just slowly go away.

Yeah. And there was an article on fatherly written by a guy named Cameron Leblanc and he traced it back even further. He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the vocational and technical a education act that Ronald Reagan signed where it said educators, colleges, it you're no longer responsible for figuring out what we want to teach our kids. we're going to hand this over to business and industry so they can tell us what they want us to teach so that we can basically train workers. That was the point from that point on for school.

Train workers as much as you can. And then eventually universities got in on the act and they're like, let's also make these like pipelines to colleges. So like that's the point of high school is to get into college and we're going to charge them out the yin-yang. So standardization of testing was a huge part of it. But that was not the only part. like you kind of touched on earlier, um Betty Fredane's feminist mystique, which kicked off the second wave of feminism is is very often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a huge chilling effect on home classes being taught in high school.

Yeah, for sure. Uh a lot of people started dropping those classes saying it was, you know, sort of symbolic of a woman's confinement to the home in the kitchen. uh the vocational education act of 1963 all of a sudden gutted or at least reduced funding uh that that Smith's Hughes act had brought about.

So uh it was you know shop class suffered kind of the same fate around the same time for the same reasons. Um we didn't have shop at my school. Uh we had industrial arts which I took. Uh and I bet you anything those have kind of lessened over the years as well now that I think about it.

Isn't industrial arts the same as shop? Is it different? No. So shop is like uh like autoshop class.

Oh, no. I think that's different. I think shop is like drill presses and lathes and stuff like that.

Well, it depends on your school. A lot of schools had autoshop class. Yeah. Like where they taught you how to change oil and work on your carburetor.

For sure. My high school had that. My middle school had shop class in home. What they call the auto shop class.

I don't remember. I don't remember. But I saw it written somewhere is like automotive arts or something like that.

Really? Yeah. Somewhere. That's funny. Um, somebody said it so I get to repeat it.

The art of changing oil. Exactly. Um, but no, I knew a couple of kids who were like, I'm going to be a mechanic and that's what I want to do after after school. I'm not going to go to college. So, it's great I'm getting this education starting now in in high school. like it would give them a huge leg up to either becoming apprentices or going and taking like um classes at a technical trade school, right? That went away. Um vocational education just really took a huge hit and again high school became a pipeline um for college.

Home still kind of stayed around. It saw the writing on the wall um but it rebranded itself as family and consumer sciences. But I think because homecck just had such a folksy oldtimey name that seemed to reinforce gendered stereotypes, family and consumer sciences is new. It's fresh. It's 90s, right? And they had a bigger emphasis on careers, helping people start careers outside the home like interior design, uh, nutrition, elder care, culinary arts, like you could become a chef, get a huge leg up taking high school classes about that. So that's still around today. But one of the biggest problems that family and consumer science classes still have that started around this time is finding qualified teachers to actually teach the family and consumer science classes that are still around in the US.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you didn't have uh you know, if these classes started to go away, then kids aren't going to be interested in that. They're not going to, you know, develop those uh skills and take those classes in college. And so without universities training these teachers, uh you're just going to have a shortage of professionals teaching it at the high school level. And that, you know, that's still going on.

Yeah. And apparently the like enrollment rates are very difficult to find. Um Livia helped us with this and she dug up a 2013 report that said about three and a half million high school kids took family and consumer science classes classes in the 2011 to 2012 school year. And that still sounds kind of impressive to me. That was a 40% drop from just the decade earlier, the as the 2000s. Um, and that they were still pretty much divided among gender lines. 65% girls and 35% boys. So, they're still out there. They're still around. They just taken such a massive hit. And yet, there's a lot of people who are like, "Okay, I get why home, you know, took a massive hit. It needed to regroup. It's regrouped now. And we're also seeing the fallout from what happens when you don't teach middle and high school kids basic life skills. They grow up to be adults who don't know how to do basic life skills. And that seems to be happening

before our very eyes. Yeah. especially, you know, when it comes to uh any any kind of like home finance um like passing basic um sort of home financial literacy uh or even financial literacy, it's really declining. I think there was a study from the World Economic Forum in 2024 that found that the majority of Americans can't pass a test of financial literacy. Mhm.

So, if you ask your average, you know, recent high school graduate and even college graduate sometimes, uh, like, you know, tell me about interest rates. What do you know about inflation or investing or compound interest or or home loans? You might get that Gen Z stare back in your face. Uh, and you know, this is the stuff that HomeMck was teaching. You know, I don't I don't remember so much learning sort of the nitty-gritty of that stuff,

but I certainly learned about, you know, banks and how to get a bank loan and how to balance your checkbook and how to kind of keep up with personal finances.

Exactly. Um or maybe even do learn how to do basic taxes like a simple 1040 form. Again, life stuff. And in addition to finance stuff, they would learn things like, you know, how to tell if a chicken breast was underdone or maybe a few recipes to cook. Um, so and if you don't teach people even basic stuff like how to cook, you can't really blame them for eating takeout constantly or eating nothing but prepackaged foods, right? So some people say that this has led to the obesity epidemic that the United States is facing at least in part. Uh, it's probably a little full-blown to say, "Yep, that's what happened. We did away with homech and now that's the problem."

The biggest problem is that's the food that's out there. But the the some people are saying like we're not these people don't have any idea how to cook at all. The parents didn't take up the slack when the home classes went away. And so that's part of the problem that came from doing away with homech.

Yeah, for sure. Uh and there are people saying that we we now have generations coming up that don't know how to adult properly. um just sort of basic chores and you know ironing and doing laundry and just sort of the the things that you need to do to survive on your own. Um they found that younger generations just you know they weren't taught that stuff as much partially from home u partially because they weren't made to do chores like we were. Uh there was a study from 2014 from Bronn Research that said 82% of parents did chores as children, but uh only 28% had their children doing chores. Uh and I think a lot of that is just

I don't know. We we had to do a lot of chores. And I think like I I don't make Ruby do as many chores as I should just because I remember what a drag chores were.

Okay. But I'm also trying to think ahead of like no, I need to teach her these life skills as well. So maybe try and mix some more of that stuff in would be a good idea.

I was wondering where that what what the cause was of that disconnect. Um yeah. So is that it's as simple as that. You just don't want to make your kid unhappy.

Uh I mean not not that we're perfectly fine with unhappiness. Uh so yeah, it's definitely not bad.

But that's what I'm saying. Like and I'm not asking you to just speak for yourself, but speak for parents today.

No, I'm speaking for myself. No, it's very important that kids experience all the full range of emotions. So, that's that's definitely not it. It's just um I don't know. For me, I think it's just like chores were such a drag and you know, and she's like, you know, nine and now 10 years old. So, I think chores will get a little more ramped up here in the tween and teen years.

You should buy her a straw hat and some overalls for Christmas and be like, "This is the year you get started."

So, um, one of the other things you might be saying is like there's an app for everything. Like, like if you can't cook, doesn't matter. Get Door Dash or, um, somebody's going to make food for you and we'll bring it to you. You just have to give them money. And it's that you just have to give them money thing. That's kind of a problem right now because um, wages haven't kept up and debt has just continued to increase. In the second quarter of 2025, America had $1.21 trillion dollars of credit card debt. The average American had almost $6,500 of credit card debt on their card at the time. Um, so it's not like there's just some some easy solution.

Like maybe there will be as stuff like that becomes cheaper, but right now there's just a whole grabag of of problems that you can trace back to if not coming from home not being taught. Home being taught could have solved them or could solve or prevent them in the future.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the good thing about these days is, you know, there's a YouTube tutorial. There's a thousand of them for every single task you could ever want to accomplish in life. Yep.

So, uh, in that case, it's good to have an app for that because I I don't think necessarily younger generations who are like, uh, I don't know how to plug in an iron. So, you know, I think they they'd look that stuff up on YouTube and teach themselves. But, you know, it's it's also good to learn that in a classroom setting, you know.

Yeah. I'm really glad you said that because this could so easily slide into, well, when we were in school, we learned all this stuff and look at how great we turned out. It could just be people who are proponents of home not understanding where where the country is going, where the culture is going and it's going away from home in a different direction that will take care of itself. Um it's not like homech is the solution to every problem. So that's a really good argument against it. There's others too. Um like do we if we bring back like um vocational education, do does the US need um jobs like that? Uh and you can make an argument against that argument and that yeah we we do especially hands-on jobs like uh trade skills like plumbing and electricians. Uh Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia said the next generation of millionaires are going to be plumbers and electricians because it's so hard to replace that with AI. So

there's like arguments one way or another, but it's you have you just have to be really careful not to slip into the back in my day things were better kind of mentality.

Oh yeah. I mean, because that will and rightfully get smacked backed in your face if you're like, "Well, how did you learn to steam a shirt?" You You didn't take home egg and this like Tik Tok, bro. Like, get out of my face.

Yeah, we do. We do things differently now. And uh we don't have to do it the way you did it.

That's right. Like, I can't set a table properly in like the the exact way it's supposed to be, but our parents' generation probably learned how to do that. It doesn't matter because the culture evolved in a way that didn't need that anymore.

Yeah. Just put the soup bowl down, cup your hands, and go to town. There you go. Uh, yeah. I don't think we can do any better than ending on that, Chuck.

Thank you. Uh, so if you want to learn more about home, go find a home class and take it and then let us know what you think about it. If you take home now, get in touch and tell us what's going on there because we want to hear uh if you got your finger on the pulse of homeck. And since I mentioned pulse, that means it's time for listener mail. Yeah. We're like, "What are you using for babies these days?" And they're like, "We're just using the babies that we've had, right?

Bring them into school." They didn't get to us in time. Uh, this is a Rockets thing. I think we ran our Rockets episode as a select recently.

Mhm. Uh, cuz t the season and we heard from Santa Claus, you guys. Uh, hey, just wanted uh I didn't know Santa was a listener, but it turns out he is. Just listened to the selects on the Rockets. You did a wonderful job. I heard you say, "You hope a Rocket writes in," which by the way did happen back when we first released it.

Uh, I may not be a Rocket, but I'm lucky enough to work very closely with these ladies 6 days a week. I've been Santa Claus in the Christmas Spectacular for the past 4 years.

Neat. Uh, to say these women are the greatest stage athletes would be an understatement. Not only are they uh the best in their field, but even offstage, they are gracious, intelligent individuals, and uh, many have other unique passions outside of dance. Uh, this year is quite special as it marks the 100th anniversary of the Rockets. Uh, not the Christmas spectacular. That'll be in 2033. But if you guys want to come see a show, let me know. I'll give you my Santa schedule and get you some tickets. Uh, my wife and I, Mrs. Claus, uh, adore stuff you should know. And we're at your last New York City Live show. Uh, thanks for everything. And that is from uh, Santa Claus. Adam,

that's sweet. Thank you, Santa. Adam, that was a really great one. And thanks for the offer, too. We're going to have to take him up on it. Chuck,

I've always wanted to see that show. So maybe maybe we'll do that one day. That's pretty great. And thanks again, Santa. Um, and before we sign off, Chuck, this episode comes out on Yumi's birthday. So I want to say happy birthday Yumi.

Uh, when's your birthday? The 30th. Oh, I thought it was the 31st. No. No wonder I'm always a day late.

Well, you're not a dollar short, Chuck. You always come through. All right. Well, happy birthday, Yi.

Thanks. Uh, and if you want to get in touch with us like Santa did, you can send us an email too at stuffodcast@ iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

Josh Clark (Host), Charles "Chuck" Bryant (Host), Livia (Guest), Nancy Darling (Guest), Ellen Swallow Richards (Guest), Danielle Dreilinger (Guest), Cameron LeBlanc (Guest), Betty Friedan (Guest).

What is "What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

The discussion explores the decline of home economics classes in education, reflecting on their impact on practical life skills and social dynamics in schools. It emphasizes the importance of these courses in teaching essential skills, such as cooking and budgeting, and examines the cultural shifts that have led to their fading presence in modern curricula.

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

43 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Bureau of Home Economics, MIT, General Mills, Campbell, Smith–Hughes Act, Buckhead. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 41 min; the transcript is about 7,798 words in 124 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.