This topic interests me because I notice it’s trendy to complain about “adulting” and I see how hard it is for many to run a home. It’s not easy to do, so this is no criticism; I just wonder if we’d all have an easier time if we actually learned these important adult skills in school. Like people used to—or at least, some people sometimes used to.

Additionally, women often struggle under the mental load, the second shift, invisible labor, whatever you want to call it. The administrative work of being a person and running a household is severely under-acknowledged and under-valued. Would explicit Home Ec, done right, help with this?

Part of my mission in writing here is to professionalize the very real work involved in running a household. This not fluffy stuff; it’s hard work worth investing time and effort into getting right. The impact on home life, and by extension society, can be enormous.

Turns out the initial founders of Home Economics had a similar idea. This diverse group included abolitionists, feminists, wives of prominent scientists, among others, who aimed to spread best practices (sometimes problematically) and professionalize the work that women contributed in the home (and back then, it was always women).

I realize the way Home Ec was implemented in practice wasn’t always ideal. In my mind, an ideal Home Ec class would include things like:

• Household safety. We require restaurant workers to take a food handling class, but why not teach everyone these important skills? Also, things like how to maintain healthy air quality indoors, check for gas leaks, etc.

• Best practices for the daily operation of a house. How to do laundry, how often to change sheets and towels, how to safely and thoroughly clean a bathroom, and so on. Include ecologically mindful practices.

• Cooking instruction.

• Executive functioning. Some schools are starting to explicitly teach this, but it seems geared towards remembering homework more than remembering to take out the trash.

• Personal finance. Even just teaching the concept of compounding would be revolutionary.

• Cultural education. It endlessly expands my worldview to see and learn about other cultures and how they do things. (Small example: Many countries don’t use clothes dryers.)

My gut says we’d all benefit from such a class, but I also see it could be a minefield (like in the past when it was only offered it to girls).

I thought I’d open up a discussion with you thoughtful readers.

Do Share

• Did you get Home Ec in school, or something similar? What was it like?

• Do you see value in explicitly teaching these sorts of things? What do you wish you’d learned in school?

• What intel can you share about Home Ec’s modern incarnation (I’m told it’s “Family and Consumer Sciences” now)? Do you know of schools offering this class?

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Oldies but Goodies from the Archive

This framework explains a lot about my life. For instance, I can figure out a system for almost anything, and my living space is super organized—as maniacally detailed in this newsletter, whose existence itself says something—so people assume I’m really on top of every other aspect of life.

But I am actually downright inept in certain everyday tasks:

1. I cannot fill out forms correctly or read detailed instructions/contracts. I once paid all my IRS taxes to the state of California because I could not decode the details of the webpage. California refused to give me back my money, and drama ensued.

2. I’ll be copying information from an appointment reminde…

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