Old-fashioned home economics
"As well as being useful, domestic science can help to save money. But now we have two generations of children who have not been taught even the basics. We are losing vital life skills."
I would love it if there were a school like this in the States -- my Home Ec clas in junior high school (I don't think we had one in high school) was mainly learning to write out a resume. Which is extremely useful, but a) I don't remember anything of it, and b) I think you can pretty easily learn to craft a resume from online templates, but learning to sew from websites is probably a little harder. Still, I've added that book -- Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management -- to my Amazon wishlist.
Our cupboard was bare
"I'm a writer, so I'm supposed to know how to say difficult things, how to blend the mundane with the significant, how to tell a story, how to make the sad at least bearable. I started e-mails in which I blathered on about my love for Mary Jane shoes, or my obsession with Neko Case, hoping to find a moment where I could say, 'By the way. Last week? I took the kids to a soup kitchen.'"
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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2 comments:
That second one was really interesting to me. Both from the point of view of a kid who grew up often without much on the table, and as a parent who occasionally found it a challenge to get food on her own.
And put me in mind of the humiliations experienced as a result of each.
Yes, I found the second one most interesting too, for similar though not mirror reasons.
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