Stuff You Should Know - What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Home economics seems antiquated – a class that teaches high school kids how to bake a cake and sew doesn’t sound super useful. But would you believe that everything from the obesity epidemic to student debt can be chalked up to home ec disappearing?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In what seems to be, a plot ripped straight out of Breaking Bad. Drugs, alcohol, trafficking of people. There are people out there that absolutely know what happened. Listen to Paper Ghosts, the Texas Teen Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 every time we recorded, a fire truck would go by, like clockwork. Do you remember? Yeah, yeah.

in the old Buckhead office. It 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. So, Chuck, we're talking about Homek today. Did you ever take a Hohmack class? I sure did, buddy.

How about you? I did. 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 Saved by the Bell. Yeah, I took it. You know, we had the full kitchen situation in our high school 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 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, oh, can't take old Mac, I'm a boy. Oh, no, of course not. And there were plenty of dudes in the class. Yeah. Yeah.

Because Gen X is enlightened. That's right. The thing is, we were really in the minority, though. All the dudes in your class were in the minority. From what I read, that was pretty uncommon even at that time. And we were among, like, the last age group who could elect for Homech pretty much across the country. Like, this was a time, this was about the end of the time, where you could find a Homek classroom. And most high schools are middle schools, but that is not the case anymore.

though 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 took a walk around, and I even remember going by where the Homeck Room was, and it was definitely not in 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 class would get really boring, really fast. Yeah, we should probably say home economics stands for home economics, just in case that's foreign to your tongue. True, true. I understand that it's called 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 in high school 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. As time wore on, you would learn to take care of a child, maybe learn 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 egg.

One little slice of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because it was made by home economists. That's right. 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 push-pull at a certain time. And which wave of feminism would that have been? The dose.

The dose? 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 in, you know, industrial engineering and 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 it.

But if you were a home ec 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 were on the turn of it. So they were still wearing tricornered hats, but they were looking forward to trains. And if you were a farmwoman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone. Yeah. I mean, what we know as Homek was not early Homek because early Homek was like you might have seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm. And you might have 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

from stuff that you're growing probably on your land and processing and canning and churning butter and your handmaking clothes and doing laundry by hand. And it's a lot. Yeah. And like you would say, 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. I suspect, and I'm pretty sure we talked about it, that this all grew out of Taylorism, that obsession with getting things as efficient as possible. 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 make the fertile soil that Homet grew from. One of them, the big one, was literacy started to spread in the mid-19th century. And so when literacy spreads, you've got more books and 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 to, 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, 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 is 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 nutritionally. 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. And then one of the biggest ones was the Morrill 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 agriculture 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, or these colleges were open to women as well, too. So these three things come together. And one of the other reasons that really made Homek 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 Hometk kind of came in to fill that break that had happened the intergenerational passage of knowledge from mother to daughter Homek said hey forget mothers We're going to 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 aleck. Yeah. And, you know, 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 movement to begin with with this quote. She said it developed, Homech, that is, from something radical, the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful. And here's the key for me. economically significant.

And it was economics. They didn't just call it that to make it seem fancy. The running of a household is big-time economics. And if you're not good at that, as we'll see with, you know, younger generations, it can spell trouble. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole washout that's happened that will cover for sure.

But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to you is Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in the history, or the early history, at least, of home economics. Now, let's just say it, the entire history of home economics. She was a pretty impressive sort. She studied chemistry. She got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar 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. was figuring out water 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 associated with Homeck is because one of the reasons Homeck existed also,

you said that it started at the college level, was as a way for women, almost a backdoor, a work around, a loophole for women to become scientists. It was okay as long as there was, enough of a whiff of woman's work, like clean water, that's woman's work, that academia could put up with it. That was one of the big ways Homek started funneling women into education and into the sciences. Yeah, I mean, she was trying to improve 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 have to start at 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 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, then it'll, you know, all boats will rise. And it started to become a movement. And, you know, this is like 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 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, started 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 huge part of economics. And up to this point, economists had basically just been looking at production. They weren't looking at the demand side.

And one of the things Homek introduced was the idea of 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 one of the things Homek introduced. Yeah. And they came up with the name Homek at one of those conferences after debating domestic science. And they said, no, that doesn't sound like it's

studying consumerism. That's a big 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 and an ironic twist that kind of takes it back home because the word economics or economics comes from, I love this word, oikanoemia, oikonomia, I insert an extra eye there, which is ancient Greek

for household management. So there you have it. Yeah. They dropped the old-timey mic at this point. 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 shortly after in 1917, the Hughes Act, started funding vocational education like shop class and Homek, and it was off to the races. Yep. So you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, like you said, Homek starts to take off? Let's do it.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, Which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Dr. Lori Santos from the Happiness Lab here. It's the season of giving, which is why my podcast is partnering with Give Directly, a nonprofit that provides people in extreme poverty with the cash they need.

This year, we're taking part in the Pods Fight Poverty campaign. And it's not just the Happiness Lab. Some of my favorite podcasters are also taking part. Think Jay Shetty from On Purpose, Dan Harris from 10% Happier, and Dave Desteno from How God Works, and more. Our goal this year is to raise $1 million, which will help over 700 families in Rwanda living in extreme poverty. Here's how it works. You donate to give directly, and they put that cash directly into the hands of families in need,

because those families know best what they need, whether it's buying livestock to fertilize their farm, paying school fees, or starting a small business. With that support, families can invest in their future and build lasting change. So join me and your favorite podcasters in the Pods, poverty campaign. Head to give directly.org slash happiness lab to learn more and make a contribution. And if you're a first-time donor, giving multiplier will even match your gift. That's give directly.org slash happiness lab to donate. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night.

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And job you should know. Word up, Jerry. Okay, so when we left off, Homek was 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, that's when the field has arrived. If you're a band and Weird Al 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 fields arrived. But it became the country's biggest employer of women scientists, which is pretty significant at the time.

That's right. Their mission, of course, was education. And it wasn't just, you know, how to cook, obviously. It was meal planning. It was budgeting. There was a lot of science behind it because they got into, you know, nutritional values. Like, in any, you know, nutritional tag that you read and, in fact, any, like, clothing tag that you read, I'll go ahead of that one. That all was born out of the science of this new bureau that was founded. They were testing mildewproofing for fabrics. They were servicing military service members, like, you know, trying to come up with better things for the U.S. military to eat.

And, of course, school lunch programs all over the country were dependent on the science. Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented, I suspect. They should have a monument to that. Well, I agree. One of the other things about that, though, in addition to 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 Homech 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 seems like we've talked a lot about that lately. But because of that, of course, you're going to have shows on the radio about this kind of 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 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. A lot of the brands got in the game. General Mills and Betty Crocker cooking school of the air. You know, it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And again, the Bureau is like helping to get all of these things launched on the airwaves. One of the other examples of what the Bureau of Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact, in addition to founding, like the mass-produced food movement, was they came up at the poverty line.

In fact, Molly Orshansky did. She was a statistician who studied how much 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 Houston. today. Yeah. And if you've ever seen, you know, astronauts eating lasagna out of a, what looks like a toothpaste tube or something like that, you can thank home economics and science for that because a woman named B. Finkelstein, great name. She was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury Project, which is pretty great. That's right. And then one of the other things that struck me, too, that I didn't realize is that a lot of those recipes that you find

on like a food label. One of the more famous ones is Campbell's Cream and Mushroom Soup labels have a green bean casserole recipe. And that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's, Dorcas Riley. And she's a good example of what was happening at this time, starting in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and continuing on, these companies like General Mills and Campbell's were setting up 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 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 Krispy Treats, you can thank the Home Economics Program and Matilla Jensen and Mildred Day at Kellogg's there for that and Checks Mix. This wasn't sort of an internal team, but Checksmix was, actually a contest. And it was in, I believe, the 1950s, when they just had a contest. Like, what can you do with Czech cereal? And someone submitted Checks Mix. And, like, it's the same recipe, basically, that everyone enjoys today, like all of these are. Did your family make

checks mix around the holidays back in the day? Not a ton. Emily's family really did, though, so she still makes, you know, that same recipe, that Chex Mix recipe. It must be so high, then, because 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 Homek had become so widespread, the average homemaker out there could do the same thing in a lot of ways that some of the homeck workers working for the company could do, too. I think that's pretty neat. Talk about efficiencies. Like, if you're baking a cake from scratch or making pancakes or something like that or a gravy from scratch, there were women in Homek's homek departments at

companies saying like, hey, we can make this, you know, there's a lot to do. So 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 hotcakes. And they did. And, you know, these were things that were real time savers in the kitchen. For sure. And that was the point, remember, of Homek is saving time, being more efficient. And then as food companies were concerned, making tons of money off of this stuff, too. So that's kind of going on in the corporate world, the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread of Homek being taught in high school and middle school. And there was a time in the 20th century, up into the 80s and 90s, and I'm sure beyond, again, these classes are still out there, but nothing like they used to be,

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. in ovens and refrigerators, and people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby. And in some cases, taking care of a real baby, too, because this stuff got intense sometimes. Yeah, the baby thing, I don't remember our high school class ever delving into that. I do remember the egg babies, 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, you know, in the shell. And because some people would be like, what the heck is he even talking about? 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've got to carry this thing around. It sounds easy just to not get that egg broken,

but it's really not. 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'd use real babies from orphanages. Yeah, apparently, at some of the colleges that were teaching Homek, they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students to just basically practice on.

And apparently there's a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger, who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics. And she said that 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, It's been in the home economic classes. Heck, yeah, man. Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for

just with complete attention and care by women who were working in, like, the cutting edge of child rearing. So they were much more desirable than the non-Homek babies, it turns out. Yeah, for sure. I mean, 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. Apparently, those eggs would get on custodian's nerves enough that they switch to flour or sugar, which also had the added benefit of heft. And I saw in some educational magazine, I can't remember,

but they would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin tones over the flour sugar. And that sometimes 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 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 more of a, like a baby simulator. It was called Baby Think It Over. I mean, they flat out said it at that point. Yeah. Like, I think we all know what Think It Over means. Sure. And 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 at 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... Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link.

But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to. to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents

before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shellgame on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Dr. Lori Santos from the Happiness Lab here. It's the season of giving, which is why my podcast is partnering with Give Directly, a nonprofit that provides people in extreme poverty with the cash they need. This year, we're taking part in the Pods Fight Poverty campaign. And it's not just the happy. Some of my favorite podcasters are also taking part. Think Jay Shetty from On Purpose, Dan Harris from 10% Happier, and Dave Desteno from

How God Works, and more. Our goal this year is to raise $1 million, which will help over 700 families in Rwanda living in extreme poverty. Here's how it works. You donate to give directly, and they put that cash directly into the hands of families in need, because those families know best what they need, whether it's buying livestock to fertilize their farm, paying school fees, or starting a small business. With that support, families can invest in their future and build lasting change. So join me and your favorite podcasters

in the Pods Fight Poverty campaign. Head to give directly.org slash happiness lab to learn more and make a contribution. And if you're a first-time donor, giving multiplier will even match your gift. That's give directly.org slash happiness lab to donate. Hi, I'm Radhi DeVluke, and I am the host of a really good cry podcast. This week, I am joined by Anna Runkle, also known as the crappy childhood fairy, a creator, teacher, and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. We talk about how the things we went through when we were younger can still show up in our adult lives, in our relationships, our reactions, even in the way we feel in our own bodies. And Anna opens up about her own story, what helped her notice the patterns

she was stuck in, and how she slowly started teaching her body that it is safe now. when I got attacked, it was very random, four guys jumped out of a car and just started beating me and my friend. And they broke my jaw on my teeth. I was unconscious. Then I woke up and I screamed. And I screamed because even though I didn't know who I was or where I was, something in me was just like, hold on, wait, they could kill me and I'm not going to let that happen. I'm not going to let that happen. I'm going to get through this. And I did. Listen to a really good cry on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Started to go downhill pretty fast in about the early 60s. And let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about where

Homek went after, well, the break. We should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, so HOMEC is on the decline, and there's a bunch of reasons for this 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, 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 there aren't any home-ex questions on these tests and the testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of even teaching that stuff?

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 Father Lee written by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it back even further. It traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the vocational and technical

Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said educators, colleges, 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 pipelines to colleges. So like that's the point of high school is to get into college. And 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, Betty Friedan's feminist mystique, which kicked off the second wave of feminism, is very often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a huge chilling effect on home at class as being taught in high school. Yeah, for sure. 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. The Vocational Education Act of 1963 all of a sudden gutted or at least reduced funding that that Smith's Hughes Act had brought about. So it was, you know, shop class suffered kind of the same fate around the same time for the same reasons.

We didn't have shop at my school. We had industrial arts, which I took. 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 thing as shop? Is it different? No, shop is like auto shop 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 auto shop 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 Homek. What'd they call the auto shop class? I don't remember.

I don't remember, but I saw it written somewhere as like automotive arts or something like that. Really? Yeah, somewhere. Somebody said it, so I get to repeat it. The art of changing oil. Exactly. But no, I knew a couple of kids who were like, I'm going to be a mechanic. That's what I want to do after school.

I'm not going to go to college. So it's great I'm getting this education starting now in high school. Like, it would give them a huge leg up. to either becoming apprentices or going and taking, like, classes at a technical trade school, right? That went away. Vocational education just really took a huge hit. And again, high school became a pipeline for college. Homek still kind of stayed around.

It saw the writing on the wall. But it rebranded itself as family and consumer sciences. I think because Homek just had such a folksy, old-timey 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, nutrition, elder care, culinary arts. Like you can become a chef or 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 U.S.? Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you didn't have, 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 skills and take those classes in college. And so without universities training these teachers, 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, and, And apparently the, like, enrollment rates are very difficult to find. 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 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 a aughts, the 2000s. and that they were still pretty much divided among genderlines, 65% girls and 35% boys. So they're still out there, they're still around, they'd just taken such a massive hit. And yet, there's a lot of people who are like,

okay, I get why Homech, 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 any kind of like home finance, like passing basic sort of home financial literacy 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. Mm-hmm. So if you ask your average, you know, recent high school graduate and even college graduate sometimes, like, you know, tell me about interest rates. What do you know about inflation or investing or compound interest or home loans? You might get that Gen Z stare back in your face. And, you know, this is the stuff that Homeck was teaching.

You know, 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. Or maybe even 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. 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 pre-packaged foods, right? So some people say that this has led to the obesity epidemic that the United States is facing, at least in part. It's probably a little full-blown to say, yep, that's what happened. We did away with Home-MEC and now that's the problem. The biggest problem is that's the food that's out there. But 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-mec classes went away. that's part of the problem that came from doing away with Homek. Yeah, for sure. And there are people saying that we now have generations coming up that don't know how to adult properly, just sort of basic chores and, you know, ironing and doing laundry and just sort of the things that you need to do to survive on your own. They found that younger generations just, you know,

they weren't taught that stuff as much, partially from Homek, partially because they weren't made to do chores like we were. There was a study from 2014 from Braun research that said 82% of parents did chores as children, but only 28% have their children doing chores. And I think a lot of that is just, I don't know, we had to do a lot of chores. And I think, like, 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 what the cause was of that disconnect. Yeah, so is that as simple as that? You just don't want to make your kid unhappy? I mean, not that. We're perfectly fine with unhappiness. So, yeah, it's definitely not bad. But that's what I'm saying.

And I'm not asking you to just speak for yourself, but speak for parents today. I'm speaking for myself. No, it's very important to do. kids experience all the full range of emotions. So that's definitely not it. It's just, 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 one of the other things you might be saying is like there's an app for everything. Like if you can't cook, it doesn't matter. Get DoorDash. Or somebody's going to make food for you and will 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 wages haven't kept up and debt has just continued to increase. In the second quarter of 2025, America had $1.21 trillion

of credit card debt. The average American had almost $6,500. of credit card debt on their card at the time. So it's not like there's just some easy solution. Like maybe there will be as stuff like that becomes cheaper. But right now, there's just a whole grab bag of problems that you can trace back to, if not coming from Homek not being taught, Homek being taught could have solved them or could solve or prevent them in the future. Yeah, I mean, I guess a good thing about these days is, you know, there's a YouTube tutorial,

But there's a thousand of them for every single task you could ever want to accomplish in life. So in that case, it's good to have an effort for that because I don't think necessarily younger generations are like, I don't know how to plug in an iron. So, you know, I think they'd look that stuff up on YouTube and teach themselves. But, you know, 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 Homek not understanding where the country is going, where the culture is going, and it's going away from Homek in a different direction that will take care of itself. It's not like Homek is the solution to every problem. So that's a really good argument against it.

There's others, too. Like, do we, if we bring back, like, vocational education, does the U.S. need jobs like that? And you can make an argument against that argument and that, yeah, we do, especially hands-on jobs like trade skills, like plumbing and electricians. 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 you just have to be really careful not to slip into the back of my day things were better kind of mentality. Oh, yeah. I mean, because that will, and rightfully get smacked back in your face. If you're like, well, how did you learn to steam a shirt?

You didn't take home egg and this sort of like, TikTok, bruh, like, get out of my face. Yeah. We do things differently now. And 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 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 suit bowl down, cup your hands, and go to town. There you go. Yeah, I don't think we can do any better than ending on that, Chuck. Ooh, thank you. So if you want to learn more about HomeMEC, go find a HomeC class and take it. And then let us know what you think about it. If you take HomeC now, get in touch and tell us what's going on there because we want to hear if you got your finger on the Pulse of HomeC. 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. Bring them into school. They didn't get to us in time. This is a Rockettes thing. I think we ran our Rockettes episode as a Select recently because tis the season. And we heard from Santa Claus, you guys. Hey, just wanted, I didn't know Santa was a listener, but it turns out he is.

Just listen to the Selects on the Rockettes. You did a wonderful job. I've never heard you say, You Hope a Rockette writes in, which, by the way, did happen back when we first released it. I may not be a rockette, but I'm lucky enough to work very closely with these ladies six days a week. I've been Santa Claus in the Christmas spectacular for the past four years. Neat.

To say these women are the greatest stage athletes would be an understatement. Not only are they the best in their field, but even off stage, they are gracious, intelligent individuals, and many have other unique passions outside of dance. This year is quite special as it marks the one. 100th anniversary of the Rockettes. 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. My wife and I, Mrs. Claus, adore stuff you should know. And we're at your last New York City live show. Thanks for everything. And that is from 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 them up on it, Chuck. I've always wanted to see that show. So maybe we'll do that one day. That's pretty great. Thanks again, Santa. And before we sign off, Chuck, this episode comes out on Yumi's birthday,

so I want to say, happy birthday, Yumi. Win's your birthday? The 30th. Oh, I thought it was the 31st. No. I wonder I'm always a day late. But you're not a dollar short, Chuck. You always come through.

All right. Well, happy birthday, Yumi. Thanks. And if you want to get in touch with us like Santa did, you can send us an email too at Stuff Podcasts at IHartRate. Radio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. There's the link.

But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And she said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night. Along the central Texas plains, teens are dying.

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