Home Economics

The standard test used to predict college grades in my era of the early 1960s was definitely sexist. One manifestation of this bias that permeated our society was the study of “home economics”, where scores were predicted for women, but not for men. The prevailing vision at that time was that pretty women who were not that bright would be leading future lives as married homemakers and needed to learn how to cook and organize housekeeping chores. Because they would be awarded a college degree, “home making” sounded too mundane, so “home economics” had been adopted to make it sound more intellectual.

I did not know any home economics majors, so I have no first hand information on their course of study. If they were really as pretty as mythology said, then they would have been looking for young men who were not only destined to financial success, but also were quite handsome. Either or both of those qualifications would explain why I flew under the home economics radar.

Home economics is a redundancy. The word economics is Greek and means household management. The only economics course I took in college was Econ 101, an introduction to the esoteric theories that enable economic theorists to make a good living arguing about which theory is correct, then eventually choosing one and waiting long enough for a cycle to develop consistent with their theory, at which time they garner acclaim as an economic guru, ignoring the many previous years when they were just plain wrong. But then economists are never wrong, because they always condition their primary position with the possibility the opposite could be true, “on the other hand”.

After my college days had passed, we learned that sexism was wrong and made some changes, apparently relegating home economics to the pasture. But it would have been better if we had instead changed the economics curriculum to make home economics the 101 course in the field and require every student to take it. We all need to learn the basics of running a household, and the sorry state of our societal personal finances shows we have not been adequately educated in that regard.

The Nobel Peace Prize this year was awarded to Muhammad Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh who pioneered the adoption of micro credit lending, primarily to women homemakers to start their own business enterprises. In a PBS interview, Dr. Yunus was asked if it was unrealistic to expect that so many people could actually be entrepreneurs, to which he replied that entrepreneurship is basic to human nature, beginning with cave people who had to make their own living in order to survive. He pointed out that the concept of capitalists employing people as laborers is a very recent development in human history and suggested that maybe moving back toward local entrepreneurship is part of the answer to the problems created by increasing globalization.

Starting in grade school, our children should be taught the basics of running a household and encouraged to develop their entrepreneurial instincts. Republicans talk of the importance of private enterprise and small businesses, but by that they actually mean protecting the corporate profits of the capitalists. True small business enterprises in my book are those with a hands on owner and a mere handful of employees, not the companies with many more employees, which the Small Business Administration designates in their table as small (some can have as few as 100 employees, but most can have 500, and some as many as 1,500 and still be designated a “small business”).

Voters well educated in basic home economics would be better prepared to consider the economic issues before casting their ballot, which probably helps explain why the power elites that control business capital and school curricula do not encourage the development and teaching of such courses.