Home economics was once a stalwart of American education.

Since the field was renamed in the 1990’s and the programs split into different classes, former educator Myrtle Stogner said the subject has been all but phased out of the average student’s career.

“The basic premise of the class was always the management of a home, and the lady who began them was the first to say there was a scientific process behind everything you did in a home,” Stogner said.

She was speaking of feminist pioneer Ellen Swallow Richards, who created the first Home Economics classes in 1909. “She believed there were scientific reasons why things worked or didn’t work in a home.”

In 1909, the world was a much different place, where more than 95 percent of births took place in the home, most women only washed their hair once a month, the leading causes of death were pneumonia and the flu. There was at least one full-time servant in 18 percent of homes.

Stogner believes the world of today needs people who are educated in the art of making a home, even worse than that world 100 years did.

“The truth of the matter is that the need for Family and Consumer Sciences to be taught in the schools is greater than it’s ever been,” she said Thursday. “People have lost their way in how to manage a family and a home and a job, and making it all work. That is not easy, but we’ve got to get better because we’re destroying ourselves. With so many people losing their jobs it is becoming critical that we improve the way we run our homes.”

Stogner taught and served as a school administrator in Richmond County from 1956 until her retirement in 1999. When she taught home economics, she said students were taught child development, food and nutrition, clothing and textiles, housing and interior decorating and relationships, as well as skills like canning vegetables.

“It was just common sense things, like we always taught to never take on a mortgage that was worth more than 25 to 33 percent of your household monthly income,” Stogner said. “What a travesty it is that we didn’t stick to that? It would’ve improved today’s economic market tremendously because that’s probably the one thing that’s put us where we are now.”

Stogner estimated well over half of today’s high school students come from broken homes, many of them in a family that never sits down to eat dinner together.

“They hit drive-thru windows, and do everything in a rush,” she said. “Families don’t work together anymore like we did growing up on a farm. That really helped to build a team, and it’s something the children of today miss out on.”

These concepts being taught in a school setting weren’t entirely new in 1909, Stogner said, though the scientific approach the course’s originator brought to it most likely was.

The Ellerbe Springs Academy was established in 1857, where girls from Richmond County paid a tuition of $12 a year to be instructed in manners, cooking and sewing and basic classes like reading, writing and math.

It would later take on boys as well, before becoming a public school in 1885.

Stogner said this type of education made a comeback during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration built schoolhouses throughout the country that included the basic layout of a gym in the middle, agriculture wing on the left and home economics wing on the right.

“’Make it’ - ‘Repair it’ - ‘Recycle’ - ‘Reuse’ - ‘Grow it’ - and ‘Do it for yourself’ - were regular mottos of the school house then,” Stogner said.

She recalled during the Second World War when home economics and agriculture teachers held canning operations to put vegetables in tin cans and farmers throughout the county came to have their food canned to keep longer than in Mason jars. They were also taught tips to stretch sugar rations using citrus fruits.

She says these types of things have been lost in public education.

“Home Economics was catchy, and it was easy-to-say, not like Family and Consumer Sciences, where the classes have all been split up,” she said. “It has created a shortage of professionals to teach the classes, and it’s being lost.”

She said RCS eliminated two of the positions this summer because of budgeting concerns and the fact they couldn’t find qualified people to hire.

“That has almost destroyed the supply of people they can hire, and industrial arts is the same way,” she said. “They just can’t find anyone to hire to teach these things.”

Gracie Jackson is also taking part in the celebration. She retired as a Home Economics teacher in 1991 after 31 years teaching the subject at the middle school and high school levels.

“I enjoyed my teaching years, but I feel like things have changed so much since then,” she said.

Jackson remains active in her community as an elected municipal officer and perhaps more visibly as the lady who picks up trash along the road way to make her community of Dobbins Heights more beautiful.

She said she doesn’t see children getting the same kind of foundation to maintain a healthy home environment from their public education today.

“I don’t think they are getting that anymore, and it shows in the overall leadership of the country,” Jackson said. “When you have strong leaders in the home, then those people make up a county, and then they make up a country. The things you do in the home rubs off on the children, as to their responsibility, and how they grow up.

“Things have changed over time, because the family and the management of a home have changed,” Stogner said. “But really, things haven’t changed so much as people have changed because of the lifestyles they have adopted.”

She said the discussions at the October event will center on how to reincorporate these subjects and lessons into the schools.

Interested?

A celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the creation of Home Economics as a school subject is scheduled at Rockingham Baptist Church beginning at 10 a.m. on Oct. 9 to feature discussions between former teachers of home economics, 4-H alumni, agricultural extension employees, homemakers and students.

It will cost $10 a person and meals will be included.