Vocational home-making education; illustrative projects

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introduction i

II. Lists of Projects 18

Introduction

1. During the college year 1918-19 it seemed expedient to form a special group of those women in my course in vocational education (Ed. 295-6), who were especially interested in the administrative and pedagogical applications of the Smith-Hughes Act in its relation to home economics education. The results of the discussions of this groups were summarized in a pamphlet' which was made the subject of a discussion by the American Home Economics Association at its Blue Ridge, North Carolina, meeting in June, 1919.

Following suggestions that there be formed for constructive work a group of women responsible for state supervision of, or the training of teachers for, " Smith-Hughes " home economics work, invitations were sent out which resulted in the bringing together in the Summer Session of Columbia University for 1919 the following sixteen persons : Maude Gregory Adams, Josephine Arnquist, Jessie Boys, Mabel V. Campbell, Myrtle Viola Caudell, Bess Chappell, Genevieve Fisher, Frances M. Gregory, Cleorac C. Helbing, Adah Hess, Frances R. Kelley, Anna L. Leggett, Kate S. North, Mildred S. Sipp, Agnes Tilson, Fannie A. Twiss.

The materials of this pamphlet are the outcome of their work.

2. The materials offered herein constitute in effect merely a report of progress. The entire subject of the " project method "

'^Vocational Homemaking Education: Some Problems and Proposals, h\ David Snedden, published by Teachers College, Columbia University.

in homemaking education is still tentative and experimental. Neither the general nor the detailed findings here published are to be regarded as final or even as expressing in detail the judgments of all the members of the group preparing them.

But in spite of the necessarily incomplete and provisional character of the projects and other suggestions here oflfered, it seemed advisable to the group to authorize their publication, since current interest in the subject is widespread and acute, and it is desirable that as many workers as possible be enlisted cooperatively in constructive work. It is hoped that the suggestions here offered will be found helpful as to method as well as to aim, and that educators will use them with due regard to their experimental character.

3. The passage of the Smith-Hughes Act providing national aid for " home economics " education (besides industrial and agricultural vocational education) brought into acute relief a problem that had long been troubling educators and others interested in the promotion of vocational education. Following the august example set when Eve was created at the eleventh hour, and as a result of the afterthought that it was not good for man to be alone, legislators and others have tardily followed the provision of new forms of education for boys and men by permitting the establishment of corresponding courses for girls. The agitation during ike last quarter of the nineteenth century for the establishment of manual training for boys was attended by efforts to provide cooking and sewing courses for girls. Many years after the inauguration of agricultural college courses, interest in the provision of similar opportunities for advanced work in home economics culminated, at least in a few states, in genuine college courses in this subject. When prolonged propaganda has led to the founding of special secondary schools of agriculture, it then occurs to someone that these schools should not overlook the girls, although farmers' daughters do not seem keenly interested in the courses offered " to prepare women to be farmers' wives." During forty years we have witnessed the evolution of the modern subject of study and practice called " home economics " from its beginnings in cooking and sewing.

domestic science and domestic arts, household arts, domestic economy, housewifery, and the like. In 1917, when the national legislation referred to above was enacted, all the progressive, larger high schools of the United States were offering home economics, while a large number of private and endowed agencies promoting the same subject were at the height of their activity.

The fundamental problem referred to was this : Is home economics education or any well established variety of it, entitled to be called vocational education? Assuming that there already existed reasonably adequate definitions of what constitutes vocational education, it can readily be seen that this general problem involves several difficult special problems: What are the vocations of " homemaking " (or housewifery or housekeeping or home management, as some would have them called) ? By what agencies, means and methods has, for any given class, preparation been heretofore given for these vocations ? Are these means diminishing in efficacy or are the demands for more competent homemaking increasing? Does vocational competency in homemaking consist largely of those " habit " products of practical experience and repeated performance which we crudely designate as manipulative and managerial skills, or does it involve chiefly those results of inquiry and study which we call technical knowledge? Should schools that confine their efforts mainly to imparting " technical knowledge," with little or no relation to " practical experience in productive work " properly be called vocational schools ? Is it wise to assume that the girls or women coming from, or going towards, any stated class of homes and homemaking responsibilities will obtain needed basic experience (including skills and other products of realistic work) in those homes, provided the home economic courses give technical knowledge ?

4. Fundamentally, these are all questions of educational aim. To the present, they have been answered, in any detail, as regards only very few forms of vocational education indeed. But the Smith-Hughes Act was clearly designed to aid vocational education, and vocational education only. Many educators and probably not a few practical men and women outside of education were, however, convinced that the home economics commonly found in high and elementary schools actually functioned in definite powers of homemaking too seldom and too sparsely to be properly recognized as vocational education. Gradually it was being seen that in almost any field of vocational subject matter at least three distinctive objectives were possible, (a) The subject-matter and practice — and this is just as true of printing, typewriting, seamanship, carpentry, and farming as it is true of homemaking — could be used as means of general or liberal education, that is, of giving experience, insight, tastes, and the like that would function in the non-vocational powers and appreciations of life, (b) The technical knowledge and accessory skills involved in, or explaining, the vocation could be so organized as to be capable of treatment under academic school conditions — that is, chiefly with text-book readings, lectures, laboratory experimentation and school shop exercise, but with only remote expectation of vocational functioning. Or, (c) the managerial and manipulative skills, the definitely related technical knowledge, and the related social, cultural and hygienic knowledge, could all be made the objectives of training and instruction designed to produce known types and degrees of vocational competency.

Now the various forms of home economics instruction heretofore found in schools belong obviously under (6) above. They are designed to impart technical knowledge, the vocational functioning of which is mildly hoped for, but never guaranteed. Technical instruction as a means of increasing vocational competency has this illusory character — it actually succeeds in the few cases, on the one hand, of those learners who bring to it as apperceptive foundations a substantial amount of practical experience and resultant interest; and, on the other, those gifted persons who possess exceptional powers of abstract thinking. To the few who have ten talents, technical instruction often adds thereunto ten other talents; but from those who possess but one talent (unfortunately the large majority), it would seem that it usually takes away even their one — at least it leaves them with false estimates of their own powers and dubious relations to the world of actual service.

Hence when local communities, learning of the possibilities of federal aid for their already expensive home economics instruction, desired that their schools be brought under the provisions of that act, confusion arose. At first it was naively assumed that the existing courses would serve, provided more time and somewhat ampler equipment were provided. But the Federal Board for Vocational Education wanted something more than technical instruction, elaborated by a little school lunch room work. It wanted real practice of some kind. But practice of homemaking as means of training therein was still as remote from the thinking of home economics teachers as is practice of engineering still remote from the plans of most colleges of engineering. In fact, it is not yet easy to find educators who sincerely believe that going into the water is an essential means of acquiring competency in swimming. Water is cold and disagreeable stuff, while books on swimming can be read so comfortably in warm dry rooms and arm and leg exercises be performed so attractively in well-lighted gymnasiums !

But the more progressive and practical home economics teachers realized that they had now a new problem to deal with. What is vocational homemaking education, what must be its specific objectives, and what its best methods?

5. For the present probably only one answer, and that a negative one, is clear. Technical instruction alone in home economics for persons of no considerable previous basic experience probably does not function as vocational competency in sufficient cases or to a sufficient degree to justify any considerable expenditure of public funds on it to that end. With some modifications of historic methods, it can doubtless be made, especially in the cases of girls from 12 to 16, to function as liberal education sufficiently to justify at least as much outlay of funds as is devoted to instruction in mathematics or foreign language ; but that is the story of another kind of educational aim.

But for vocational homemaking we require more practical objectives, and more practical methods. What shall they be?

The objectives must first of all be derived from direct studies of homemaking as now practiced among the more successful of the fifteen million homemakers, considered separately as prosperous and poor, black and white, rural, suburban and urban, educated and uneducated, servant-assisted and unassisted, with normal number of children, and without. These objectives must be based upon careful consideration of the extent to which practical training in the home itself — prior or subsequent to schooling — can be depended upon to give basis for, or to supplement, school training. Finally, they must be based on more thoroughgoing study than has yet been given, first to the probable motive power for vocational education to be found in girls of fifteen or eighteen, or twenty-two or after marriage, in any given social group, and second to the keeping qualities of vocational training when placed in cold storage for five or seven wage-earning years. Some of these problems have been given provisional analysis in the pamphlet referred to in the footnote on page i.

6. Whatever character will eventually be developed for the specific objectives of vocational homemaking education, it is certain that questions of method will also be of the greatest importance. At present chief interest centers in the project method. In agricultural education of secondary grade the project method has been generally accepted as far superior, for the average student at least, to the more academic methods of text-book and laboratory on the one hand, or the more apprenticeship-like methods of routine participation in productive work, attended by study of parallel technical subjects, on the other. Homemaking bears many points of resemblance to the farming vocations. It is essentially a composite vocation. Managerial powers are at least as necessary in it as manipulative. It easily breaks up into more or less discrete or separable jobs. Its related technical knowledge is to be found in at least a half score of sciences and arts, none of which can be studied in any completeness as independent subjects by the student of average ability or available time. Hence if the project method proves the best in agricultural education we have every reason for believing that it can be successfully applied in homemaking education.

7. But it would be easy to make rash assumptions and to proceed too hurriedly in this matter. Already we find bulletins, state and federal, urging teachers to employ the project method, but giving them no hint of what it really is in detail. The present study represents the results of six weeks of work in trying to g^ve concrete expression to ideas of serviceable projects. Though this work has been done by some of the best qualified teachers and supervisors of home economics in the United States, it will be freely conceded by all of them that they have proceeded only a few steps into this unexplored continent of possibilities.

It is not so difficult, of course, to analyze out a series of possible jobs in homemaking and even to range these in orders of difficulty adapted to different girls, according to their ages and abilities. Neither is it difficult for inventive teachers, experienced in the practical aspects of homemaking, to dissect these jobs into suitable stages and thereby to isolate out for consideration the detailed procedures that should successively be studied and practiced by the learner. But it is difficult, and it becomes in reality almost one of the finest of pedagogical arts, to provide for a psychological linking up with the job, or any part of it, of the normal related technical, social, hygienic, and cultural knowledge, without which linking up the job is only a job (worth something for education in skill of course) and not at all an educational project in the true sense of the word.

The following seem to be some of the principles of organization and procedure essential to successful project work in homemaking.

8. Every project should have a certain magnitude based upon customary practice in the world of work. Where skills are obtained with some difficulty sufficient repetition to carry the learner to an early point of diminishing returns (to use the economist's phrase) should be required. Experience seems to suggest that no project should be so small or fragmentary as to require less than six or eight hours, with necessary repetitions, nor any so extensive as to necessitate more than sixty to eighty hours. (In agricultural education the magnitude of projects must be much greater because of dependence on year round work ) .

9. Each project should be very fully analyzed in a leaflet or booklet prepared for that case or type of learner to which a given individual most nearly approximates. The controUing purpose in the preparation of this printed analysis should be to make the student as completely independent of personal consultation with teacher or others as practicable. We aim to produce a worker who can obtain new direction and knowledge readily from printed sources — one of the most important goals of all effective education. This booklet should give constant reference in page detail to books, bulletins, and articles that demonstrably constitute related knowledge — whether in the immediate field of needed technical knowledge clearly necessary to the performance and comprehension of the project itself — or in the more remote social hygienic and cultural fields given significance by the project.

10. In most cases in the pupil's guide to the project it seems best to make approaches by questions — first, questions directing attention to major stages of attack on problems, and then questions enabling the student to resolve these into easy steps, capable of being worked out one by one. (This method of presentation was first used, to the writer's knowledge, by Rufus W. Stimson, of Massachusetts, in connection with agricultural school projects.)

11. In the actual working out of a project the learner should be required to plan much in advance, to think out details, and even to make notes or written descriptions of what she expects to do, whereon to obtain the teacher's prior approval. It must never be forgotten that a major factor in good homemaking is management — of one's own time, resources and responsibilities, and not the services of others necessarily — and that the central essentials in good management are prevision, forethought, prearrangement, planning — as found in the competent housekeeper of whom we say that " her head runs ahead of her heels."

12. The best project work for educational purposes will usually be done in the environment most nearly normal for that kind of work and for the worker concerned. Hence projects carried out in a school laboratory, a school lunch room, or even a practice house will often be found lacking in essential elements of reality. The home of the girl or woman — her parents' home, of course, if she is unmarried — will usually furnish the most realistic conditions. Furthermore, the hours, seasons, and all other working conditions should as nearly approximate those of the world of work as can normally be arranged.

13. But of paramount importance is it that the project shall consist of productive work. Meals must be cooked to be eaten, beds made to be slept in, rooms cleaned to be lived in. babies cared for because the care is required, gardens improved because they need it. " Make-believe " w^ork, exercises, unessential performances should be sternly repressed, if not prohibited. Probably in only a few cases — of which the minor division, Housing and Furnishing, ofifers the only instances now apparent — will it be necessary to go through the motions only of real work — -to " simulate " actual useful performance as we had to do in training our men for war.

14. Hence the desirability of putting project work on a commercial basis wherever practicable. The useful product should bring to the worker a net return for her labor, due allowance being made to the person served for the risks and inconveniences of being served by a learner. The formidable obstacle, of course, to this pa3'ment for service is the fact that so often it will be done in homes where conditions do not normally permit the employment of paid service. Here, of course, the service must be given. But in the cases of project work done in homes where it can replace service that would otherwise be paid for, as well as in all cases where the product can be sold, a reasonable net return should come to the learner (no deduction, of course being made for school supervision or facilities provided as part of the educational process).

15. Each project must be made the vitalizing center for the study of that technical or interpretative knowledge which is germane to it. Caution must be exercised in providing that such study of related technical knowledge shall be neither too cursory nor too thoroughgoing. Teachers interested only in immediate performlO VOCATIONAL HOME-MAKING EDUCATION

ance will scamp on technical learning so that their pupils will be getting the benefits of what is in reality only apprenticeship learning — chiefly unrationalized practical skills. Other teachers — and under present traditions, probably the majority, at least in Foods, Laundry, and Accounting, — will tend to use the practical work of the project only as a suggestion or starting point for endless and interminable excursions into the fascinating realms of technical knowledge.

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand.

Little flower — but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all

I should know what God and man is.

These teachers would build an entire system of bacteriology around a yeast cake and a system of chemistry about a baking powder biscuit. But, however attractive this process to the teacher enthusiast, it is usually death, if not to the interests of her learners, at least to their powers of normal and wholesome assimilation. Obviously much pedagogical research must be devoted to this subject before we shall be able to proceed confidently. For the present, existing text-books and manuals should be used only for reference purposes, and sparingly and circumspectly at that.

1 6. Similarly the fields of related social, hygienic and cultural knowledge normally to be entered under the stimulus of project study remain as yet almost wholly un worked. Almost every good homemaking project can be made a very real port of embarkation for the study of some social, health or cultural topics or problems genuinely related to it. Some of these easily suggest themselves ; others require the constructive aid of experts.

17. All of which suggests the very great desirability of providing for each project not only a " pupil's guide," but a teacher's guide as well. If federal or state or other central authorities would at an early date provide detailed suggestions for teachers in booklet form for such projects as bread making, breakfast getting, home accounting, family garment upkeep, after-

INTRODUCTION II

noon child care, and family laundry, they would be rendering an incalculable service. Here would be opportunity for cooperative effort in determining the kinds and degrees of technical knowledge that, for stated case groups, naturally relate to specified projects. Here could be given a wealth of suggestions for related readings, sub-projects, laboratory exercises and oral presentations on the part of the teacher designed to enrich and round out the project so as to make it in maximum measure educative.

1 8. It should be apparent by this time that pupils' guides to any given project will require very different treatment according to the case group for which it is designed. In subsequent work on the topics considered in this book it is suggested that at the outset at least two and preferably four or five distinctive typical case groups be described in detail and be made the point of reference by number or other designation for all recommendations of courses or methods.

Unless otherwise indicated the projects of this book are based upon the assumed powers and capacities of " Case B " girls — urban high school girls, 14-16 years of age, living at home, electing voluntarily the homemaking two-year course described in Bulletin 28 of the Federal Board for Vocational Education.^

Case groups will obviously range in powers from retarded girls 14-16 years of age (quite incapable of doing regular high school work) to women of 22 who have spent six or seven years in wage-earning work, or college students of equal age, with seven years of liberal education beyond the elementary school, as well as splendid heredity and family culture behind them. Ultimately, we may expect to see six or seven types of booklet on any individual project adapted respectively to the differing needs and capacities of a half dozen widely variant groups.

19. It is probable that extreme flexibility in time and order of various projects offerings should be favored until we know definitely what are the various varieties of difficulty to be encountered. Certainly there are no reasons known at present why food projects should either succeed or precede clothing

^ For discussion of " cases " see Vocational Homemaking Education: Some Problnus ai:d Proposals, pp. 13-20.

projects. Simple projects in accounting are just as feasible as projects in laundry and child care. In fact in any of the five major or five minor divisions into which homemaking projects are for convenience here grouped (foods, clothing, house care, laundry, child care ; and accounting, care of sick, housing and furnishing, adult sociability, and yard and garden care) it would be practicable to devise simple projects which could be taken at any early stage ; and it would be no less practicable in each to discover projects so complicated and exacting as to require much of maturity and experience.

Within any division we may expect experience to show us certain desirable sequences of projects, but for the present we should reserve final decisions even in these matters. The project method does ofifer opportunities, unequalled under any other method, of adapting work to the native powers and previous experience of the individual girl. Hence, out of a series of projects we may find it expedient to allow a capable beginner with good home experience background to commence with a fairly complicated piece of work.

Probably we shall tend to develop, in each division, several groups of projects, each group representing a different degree of manifest difficulty. A group suitable for beginners might be designated as the "a" group (ai, a2, a3, etc.), while a group presenting difficulties that could normally be met only by learners having experience equivalent to that required by the successful performance of an " a " group project would be called the " b " group (bi, b2, b3, etc.).

20. What will prove the best administrative organization of home project work in homemaking? Here much experimentation is necessary. Analogy with agricultural education suggests a few tentative conclusions. Much reliance cannot be placed on rigidly organized class work. Ideally, any given teacher should be prepared to direct home projects in any one of the ten divisions — • she should, in other words, be an all-round homemaker herself, equally competent in clothing, child care, furnishing or food projects.

For full time work (eight hours daily) one teacher should

INTRODUCTION I3

probably not have more than fifteen pupils if she is to preserve suitable contact with home projects. For half time work (four hours daily minimum) it is doubtful if one teacher should be responsible for more than twenty-five girls. Teachers will necessarily have to adjust themselves to flexible personal schedules in order to supervise such projects as breakfast getting, evening child care and the like. But, like many others of the workers of the world, such as nurses, street car drivers, waitresses and others, interested teachers will soon adjust themselves to irregular schedules, shifts, " divided turns," and other devices where departures from traditional schedules are necessary.

For full time students probably not more than three hours daily (for five days in the week) should be claimed for class work and joint conference purposes. One of these hours should regularly be given, doubtless, to the " related social and cultural " readings and discussions which are provided to give vision and higher appreciations as to woman's work, the possibilities of the home, etc. For these purposes inspiring books are needed. Olive Schreiner's Wouian and Labor will be used by some to advantage. If we posessesd a twentieth century How Gertrude Teaches Her Children it would fill an acute need in homemaking literature. Perhaps the Woman's Home Companion and other similar journals will be found helpful by some teachers.

For the rest, the teacher will reserve needed time for individual conferences, sometimes in the home, sometimes in the school, where pupils are doing their reading. It cannot too often be insisted that good vocational education is moving, steadily, towards the methods of " individual " instruction, and that pupils must increasingly be taught to rely upon themselves in reading and planning, provided specific guidance thereto is given in printed matter.

21. It has heretofore been assumed that the girl's "own home " will furnish the most accessible source of opportunities for " productive " projects. But it can be safely prophesied that many opportunities, and those the most excellent, will be found, once the crusts of tradition and artificial conventions are broken, in homes other than those of the girl's parents. Within easy walking distance of any college and almost every boarding school to-day are located scores of homes in which help is urgently needed — help in caring for children, washing clothes, mending, preparing and serving meals, caring for adult sick, renovating garments, helping with " parties." Here are Hmitless opportunities for the most effective kind of educative participation, once home economics teachers (better call them homemaking teachers for the future) shake themselves into the conviction that it is necessary to enter the water if one would learn to swim, and cultivate dispositions and ability to propose and supervise " part-time " projects among their neighbors on the part of their pupils. In many cases it may be pedagogically very much better for the girl, especially if she be upward of i8 years of age, to work out projects in homes other than that in which she has lived. Furthermore, these projects in other homes offer many opportunities for the partial " wage " compensation which is so desirable. On the other hand, care must be taken not to have more than a small amount of work done under the conditions created by a very different financial standard of living than that which the girl herself can reasonably expect. A series of projects carried out in a home on a $5000 yearly budget might constitute poor, if not disastrous, preparation for homemaking in the case of a young woman whose prospective husband can hardly expect to earn more than $900-$i200 per year (1914 prices).

22. The application of the project method in rural schools will require some modifications of plans designed to meet conditions of urban population concentration. Short course boarding schools will in some cases be found the best solution. Intensive courses not exceeding three months in length seem to the writer to represent an optimum standard.

In the case of girls living at home and coming from distant points to school, programs could and should be arranged whereunder school attendance need not be made more than two or three times weekly — the remaining days being taken for project work at home, which the teacher could arrange to inspect. It must be remembered that, because of the practical experience already obtained by the majority of country girls, their project work will take the direction of " advanced " or " extension " instruction and training. Of course, if the girl is dividing her time between liberal and vocational studies, the school attendance requirements of the former will control.