100 years of Home Economics

Much has changed since 1900, when at New York State College, Martha Van Rensselaer organised courses for housewives to raise women's literacy level and to educate them.

This is how home economics was born, to follow a path which absorbed the schools of thought of the educational process on its way. Undoubtedly the purpose of this area of education was to cope with the way we look at things as times change. Much water has passed under the bridge since then and home economists have been contributing to the discussion on ways to cope with consumer education, citizenship, the environment and sustainable development, together with other disciplines, from their multidisciplinary perspective. Indeed today's lifestyles are strongly linked with technology, to more than the social and physical environment because of greater insights into human thought and human behaviour.

The family is the basic cell of society, but do we give much thought to the fact that family education is a high-powered and professionally specialised area of education? Undoubtedly, as in the 1900s, we also started with the initial dimension of technical expertise by which women primarily utilised their environmental and economic resources to their best ability to keep happy families going.

We have also entered the technological-scientific phase, which we called domestic science, when technology and health were the main purposes of the day in harmony with the influx of advancing science. What then? How can education serve families by empowering them to cope with rapid change? There are several studies relating to the impact of change on home economics, an educational area which would be definitely useless if it is left to stagnate without addressing the reality of families within their environment both local and global.

Home economists then started researching on the shifts taking place from country to country regarding the needs and problems of families in transition. Dr Sue Mcgregor (Mount Saint Vincent University) addressed these movements as paradigm shifts.

To put it simply, we change the way we look at things according to the times we live in and the constraints and resources of our environment. Paradigms evolve with time although they do not have a clearly defined borderline between them. The overlapping of timelines raises the need for further analysis so as to achieve more effective remedies and practice especially so when new forms of social problems emerge

The family then was seen as a system within the global eco-system highlighting the functions of dependence and interdependence of families within their environment. A new body of knowledge emerged in education through which family education was oriented towards a systems approach away from the eco-centric or individualistic dimension into an interdependent perspective where the family lives in the community, a wider system within the eco-system, hence Human Ecology.

The good life, consumer goods and luxury lifestyles have generated waste and too much urban development which in turn impacted on the health and safety of families. Thus, as it were, families had to be re-educated to consider their lifestyles as an environmental issue because it is humans who can change the environment but it is also humans who will receive the impacts of change.

A cultural perspective to home economics has generated the contextual paradigm because families live within a physical and social environment that differs because of geography, culture, beliefs and traditions. It is for this reason that home economics courses differ from place to place in the use of a wide and substantial knowledge base.

For this reason course design is a highly professional education exercise, which must draw on other disciplines also from the contextual perspective of previous practice and experience together with today's educational needs. If we want to educate towards a culture of excellence with the potential for competence in a global environment we cannot ignore this perspective.

Through families, a culture is improved and transformed if families are empowered by the skills of coping with the realities of life. Consumer education is not simply taught to make use of consumer goods but it is taught with citizenship education in mind. Educators would achieve much if they accept these developments and apply them to our local context in the light of worldwide educational movements.

I have found a truly source of enrichment on the Website of Dr Sue Mcgregor, which is highly enlightening and scholarly (www.consultmcgregor.com).

With her permission, I will quote some of the insight she expresses regarding Home Economics and its 100 years of evolution and paradigm shifts:

The home economics paradigm shift discussed (in her paper) provides the sustenance and underpinnings of rich dialogue and theoretical development. It challenges us to question the basic assumptions underlying our practice hopefully leading to an "intellectual evolution" such that great changes can take place in the discipline of home economics, and by association the world. We will have to question our ideology, assumptions, principles, and values, current base, university, curricula, textbooks, lectures, even research programmes, policy recommendations and daily practice with families. More importantly we have to deal with the answers generated by this individual and collective reflecting process which will take time.

Helping individuals and families embrace the future is a leadership imperative we can fulfil if we remain open to new ways of seeing families in relation to the world and in changing the ways we serve families which, according to Brown and Paolucci, authors of The Mission of Home Economics, is supposed to change over time with new insights in the profession. Insights come from critical reflection about human needs, the human condition and about the field and from new knowledge. Consideration of the impact of different paradigms on home economics practice is germane to this enlightenment and professional growth and evolution.

Professor Mcgregor is co-ordinator of Peace and Conflict Studies programme of Mount Saint Vincent University of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Another person related to home economics is Dr Doris Badir, who had persuaded the United Nations to launch the Internatioal Year of the Family, launched here in Malta in 1994 at a conference for NGOs. Through this conference, much has been achieved. Doris Badir was honoured for extensive work in family education.

A point of interest is the emerging research on the role of the father which had cropped up in the workshops at the Malta conference and which in my view is an important element in the education for the equality issue which should be balanced in its perspective encompassing the total reality of family living. It will be a great loss if all the care that has been given to the welfare of the family is allowed to remain still without moving with time when we have so much experience to use in the transformation of family education necessitated by the changing conditions of the world we live in.

Lina Caruana, BA, has a Certr Ed. in Home Economics