Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? Not if She Takes Home Ec, 1985-Style : High Schools Stress Budgeting Over Baking

Inside Reseda High School, a revolution in home economics is brewing--but not on a stove or in an oven.

This was demonstrated on a recent afternoon as 17 girls met in Room H-5 at Reseda High for a home economics class called “Marriage and Family Studies.” As each teen-ager softly spoke of what she wanted from life, the ovens and stoves in the back of the classroom looked more and more like relics from an archeological dig than modern teaching aides.

Meanwhile, down the hall in Room H-2, another home ec class, this in “Consumer Education,” was taking place. Here, boys and girls grappled with the job of bringing down their gas and electric bills in order to balance family budgets.

Indeed, in all the San Fernando Valley’s 16 high schools, home economics classes and marriage and consumerism are light-years removed from the cooking and sewing classes of a few years back. And this radical shift will no doubt have a profound effect on future homemakers.

Once upon a time, the chief goal of home economics classes was to domesticate teen-age girls by passing along such time-honored skills as baking and basting, sewing and hemming. In this manner such American mainstays as the Sunday roast and apple pie were handed down from one generation to the next, a kind of patriotism of the palate. Here, too, American girls were imbued with a pioneer spirit of self-reliance, having to stitch together their own clothes.

But today, home economics in Valley schools has as much to do with the Sigmund Freud as with Betty Crocker.

Contemporary home economics courses now cover such sophisticated and intimate subjects as “Independent Living,” “Parent-Child Development,” “Marriage” and “Family Studies.” As for plain, old-fashioned food classes, a few still do survive. However, most food courses now offer a clinical examination of good nutrition rather than a “hands-on” approach in the kitchen.

Local schools have shifted their home economics programs from such modest aims as making meat loaf to more complicated endeavors such as making marriages work, as the result of life-style changes outside the classroom.

The increasingly widespread use of convenience foods and such high-tech gadgets as microwave ovens has dramatically altered attitudes toward cooking. Moreover, with husbands and wives taking on more shared domestic responsibilities, the line between homemaking and other marital duties has been blurred. Taken together, these factors have tended to lessen the importance of, say, knowing the ingredients needed for a tuna casserole as contrasted with a clear understanding of the emotional ingredients needed to preserve a marriage.

Kay Greene, the teacher in charge of Reseda High’s home economics program, attributes the dramatic changes to a decline in “do it yourself-ism.” With so much of today’s clothing so modestly priced, there’s little impetus to labor over homemade garments. Moreover, fast and frozen foods and the microwave oven have reduced cooking to a hobby for most, when before it was an indispensable part of keeping house.

“Today you do not have to know how to cook or how to sew in order to survive,” Greene explained during a break between her classes. “At one time these two things used to be a vital part of homemaking--clothing a family yourself and feeding it--but today they aren’t a big consideration.”

Greene doesn’t think that social forces are the only ones responsible for changing local schools’ home economics programs. In her judgment, financial pressures have also influenced home economics courses in Valley schools. “The cost of food is tremendous ,” she noted, “and, here at Reseda, as with most schools, we only get a certain budget.”

Greene paused and smiled wistfully. “You try to figure it out. If you have 30 students in a food class and you prepare food once a week, and the amount you can spend is about $10 a class.” She paused again, and then added: “That is not very much . . . given today’s food prices.”

Greene, who started teaching in the 1950s and is now in her fifth year at Reseda, noted that governmental agencies have also had an effect on home economics programs. “The state and federal funding programs require that we put more emphasis on nutrition than on applied food subjects such as cooking. And so that, too, is why the schools have moved away from the basics, such as cooking and sewing classes, into more informational classes.”

One woman who is in large measure responsible for the innovative home economics programs is Kris Romness. Romness taught at El Camino High School for seven years and today oversees all home ec programs for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 75 junior- and 48 senior-high schools.

In Romness’ view, the home is not an impregnable fortress of blissful domesticity, but a part of the world also buffetted by society’s changes. Given this outlook, she has sought to enlarge the subject matter covered by home economics. Under Romness’ direction about 38 different home economics classes are offered, ranging from consumer education to courses that explore a student’s sense of worth and self-esteem.

“People have more responsibilities in every part of their lives,” she explained. “For example, this is true in the workplace, which means that many parents are no longer home and that many children are left far too much on their own.” As a result, Romness said many youngsters never learn basic adult skills that they would have if mom and dad had been around more.

Consequently, local schools now need to teach youngsters such vital skills as parenting and dealing with emotional strains put on modern marriages, issues that knowing how to prepare a pot roast won’t address. “If there is hope for a better life,” Romness said, “then certainly we in home economics must be dedicated and devoted to improving the quality of family life.”

Teaching students such customary cooking skills as how to bake an apple pie was put on the back burner since, according to Romness, it was far more important that youngsters receive a solid education in “good nutrition and how to eat right.”

“We now consider stuff like apple pie a ‘fun food,’ a party food since it really doesn’t have any nutrient values that you’d want to base a healthy diet on,” she said.

Romness’ view of home economics is found in El Camino High School’s curriculum as well as Reseda’s.

According to Ceola Wiley, El Camino’s assistant principal, the high school’s home economics program has changed radically in recent years. “The classes aren’t aimed at the usual trend of food and clothing,” she said. “Now the focus is on such things as child development, marriage, and family and bachelor living . . . That sort of thing.”

She said the strikingly different nature of home economics is most dramatically seen in the number of males enrolled in the class. “Today we have as many boys as girls . . . and that is quite a change. We have five classes and they’re all filled.”

Wiley said that home ec classes are no longer where students go “to cook and eat.” To those who persist in envisioning home economics as the stuff Norman Rockwell paintings are made of, Wiley crisply commented that today’s classes are geared to “teaching the modern techniques of living” and are not concerned with perpetuating quaint but outmoded homemaking skills.

Nonetheless, there are those who feel nostalgia for the old-fashioned ways.

Although Kay Greene lauds the changes wrought on her beloved home economics, she still harbors concerns that an ineffable something is being lost on today’s youngsters. “I think families have changed tremendously already,” she said.

Then, almost apologetically, she added: “The biggest change I’ve noticed through the years with students in my home economics classes is that they’re not as interested in developing their skills as best they can.”

Greene shook her head and said: “They think everything should be pretty easy.”

And, in Greene’s view, such a fast-food attitude toward home economics is regrettable, since she firmly believes that part of the joy of having your cake comes from knowing how to bake it, too.