How does home economics education in various countries allow children to enjoy it?
Editor's note
In the past May, the Ministry of Education released the "Compulsory Education Labor Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition)", which formulated "organization and storage", "household cleaning, cooking, home beautification and other daily labor" according to different school sections. The goal will be implemented in the fall semester of 2022.
This news has sparked a lot of discussions in the education circle and parent groups, which not only means that the status of home economics education in my country's education system has been significantly improved, but also reflects a clear change in educational philosophy.
In general, the attitude of most parents is that positive is greater than negativity, and expectations are greater than doubts. After all, it is a blessing to let children master various life skills from an early age.
When it comes to home economics education for adolescents and children, how have other countries integrated this content into the teaching system?
How do they view the impact of hands-on ability and housework awareness on children's life?
Switzerland
Gender distinction in home economics education is gradually diminishing
When my 14-year-old eighth-grade junior high school student didn't come home for lunch on Friday noon, I knew it was time for the bi-weekly home economics class again.
My kids would jokingly call home economics a cooking class.
The class time is a total of four classes, including buying, cooking, eating, and finally cleaning up the kitchen and washing the dishes, a total of three hours.
Usually a starter, a main course and a dessert.
The menu is mainly prescribed by the teachers themselves, and the cooking methods and procedures will use traditional Swiss school cooking materials.
Home Economics also teaches how to
Understanding money, planning to spend
Home economics in Switzerland is also called WAH, which is the abbreviation of the German vocabulary economy, labor and family.
The content and teaching objectives of the course are the same as the name of the course.
Although the practical operation of the course is mainly cooking, the teacher will intersperse the WAH syllabus while teaching cooking.
There are five major themes in teaching: 1. Explore and become familiar with the process of production and labor.
2. Familiar with the market and buying process, understand money.
3. Design a shopping list.
4. Plan meals and household consumption.
5. Popularize the knowledge of healthy nutrition and explore new food culture.
The specific operations are: How to read the nutritional content of food when purchasing?
What are the basic nutrients?
How to reasonably mix all the key nutrients within a limited budget?
Sometimes there will be more fashionable themes, such as how to reduce food waste, go to a store in Switzerland that sells "leftovers (expiration food)" to buy ingredients, take the children to visit the Swiss Agricultural Fair and see Switzerland How agricultural products are produced and sold.
Teachers also try out more exotic recipes like Japanese roll sushi and Chinese fried noodles.
In fact, teenage children in Switzerland do not consciously love labor.
When my junior high school students came home from home economics class, she complained: the teacher didn't let them use the dishwasher, and asked everyone to wash the dishes by hand.
Children will also complain that the teacher's recipes do not conform to the latest nutrition knowledge, such as not enough protein and too much sugar.
For example, a fruit salad teacher has to rigidly follow the steps in the traditional recipe book and add a few spoons of sugar.
The children debated with the teacher that the recipe was outdated and unreasonable.
However, this process also let the children know that housekeeping requires both hands and minds.
In addition to cooking, children in Switzerland have always had handicraft classes in school, which are very important in the local educational philosophy, and they are compulsory courses rather than hobby classes.
Switzerland attaches great importance to vocational education, so the foundation of hands-on ability is laid in school at an early age.
Kindergarten and junior elementary school are relatively simple to teach. In senior elementary and junior high school, the handicraft class is divided into two branches: mechanic and textile. Children need to learn basic woodworking skills, simple metal welding, sewing and knitting.
Stronger hands-on ability
Save yourself more money
The labor cost in Switzerland is high, and most people do their own housework, and the whole family participates.
Swiss people generally ask their children to participate in domestic work at home, but there are also two different views in Swiss families.
First, children's participation in labor is part of family life, and labor and pocket money are not linked.
Others will pay their children wages, arguing that pocket money is earned from labor.
The way my family takes is somewhere between these two. The children have some fixed voluntary housework, and there will be some "wages" for the extra labor.
Children should know from an early age that labor has exchange value.
Reasonable wages are required to provide labor for people and to hire professional workers to work.
Hiring a master electrician in Switzerland to repair a socket or change a light bulb may cost a lot of labor, so Swiss children know that the more hands-on skills they have in their daily life, the more they can save money for themselves.
Boys and girls learn the same
Textiles and Technicians
Switzerland has always been a country with relatively conservative gender roles, and Swiss people in their 60s remember that when they were in school, only girls took home economics lessons.
At that time, in the school's manual course, it was stipulated that boys would be skilled in woodworking, metal welding, etc., while girls would be sewing and knitting. Later, it was gradually changed to children's choice.
When self-selection, it still showed the same gender-selective tendency as before.
According to the regulations of the recent unified education reform in Switzerland, all primary school students, regardless of gender, are required to participate in technical and textile technical courses.
Whether you are a boy or a girl, you must be able to make simple furniture, simple sewing, repair small things, knit a scarf and hat.
In the sixth grade, my daughter brought home a coffee table that can be flipped over. She usually carries a sports bag she made herself, and wears a woolen hat she knitted on her head in winter.
In eighth grade, I wore my own sweater and ate my own sushi.
The sofa cushions at home are also covered with covers that the children designed, dyed and embroidered, and grandparents received cutting boards and tea cups made by the children at Christmas.
Text / Jia Shufen (now living in Switzerland)
new Zealand
Every stage of a child's growth is accompanied by labor
In New Zealand, the wages of skilled workers are much higher than that of general office white-collar workers. Plumbers, plumbers, and electricians who have had business dealings all work alone to support a family. In addition, every stage of New Zealanders' growth is accompanied by working.
I still remember the scene of my youngest son going to kindergarten on the first day. As a parent, if you want to stay with your child in kindergarten, even if you stay for a whole day, the teacher is very welcome.
I took the opportunity to experience the daily life of the kindergarten, and a tool cabinet caught my attention. Hammers, saws and various nails were neatly placed in it. There was also a vise on the tool table next to it, the teacher explained. This cabinet can only be opened when a dedicated teacher is present, and it attracts many children every time it is opened.
Kindergarten children are happy to water and weed the flowerbeds, watch the flowers and plants grow up and bear fruit, and then eat a bite of the strawberries they grow by themselves. They can show off for a while; When planting begins, a cute label made by yourself will be inserted next to it.
When my son was in the first grade, each class would put a pot of plants that caterpillars like to eat in the classroom. There were already butterfly eggs on it. The children could observe the whole process of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. With a "goodbye", watch them fly away gradually; for middle school students, the school will set up a special flower garden team, the teacher is responsible for explaining the knowledge of plant planting, and the students are responsible for the daily garden management, attracting many bees, butterflies and various insects, Make the campus look alive.
Schools in New Zealand are open. You can go to the school on weekends and holidays. Every summer, I will bring my children to the school to water the garden. Sometimes I find that someone has already come to water it. .
The campus of New Zealand primary school is more like a children's paradise. There may be treasures such as branches or stones picked up by children hidden in the corners, but you can't see the garbage. If there is, the school's green team will immediately wear it. Put on work clothes, put on kegs, and bring their captain—a fluffy Kiwi bird to clean up the yard; upperclassmen take on jobs that younger classmates envy, such as directing traffic on the street outside the school gate when commuting to and from school. On rainy days, passing students will hold up umbrellas to protect him from the rain; during lunchtime on rainy days, senior students are responsible for taking care of their classmates in the lower grade classrooms; Students are involved in the front desk work in the school office, including answering the phone, receiving students and outsiders.
The weekly cooking class attracts many children to sign up, and students can prepare their own lunch boxes and choose to participate based on their own interests.
The school will encourage children to make food at home or with the help of their parents, and write down the recipe and production process, and make cookbooks. I once took my children to make fritters, which is simple and unique.
Labour is part of New Zealand's life and an essential source of growth and happiness for children.
Text/Yuan Wei (now living in New Zealand)
U.S.
Loving work and respecting giving is a family style
When I lived in New Mexico, I used to go to my good friends Kathy and Joseph's house and cook them Chinese food.
The Chinese food I cook is very simple. I have never cooked dumplings, steamed buns, or pan-fried pies. I just stir-fry vegetables with rice, and they are full of praise.
Every time I want to help clean up after finishing the meal, they stop me and say, "It's our family's rule that the cook doesn't have to wash the dishes." Every meal is brought to the table, and the first thing to do is to say thank you to the cook. ; After tasting the first bite, you must say, "It's delicious." Then, during the meal, you must praise the taste of the food and the craftsmanship of the cook more than once.
Later, when I married Casey's older brother, Tony, I became more and more aware of the benefits of this kind of home education.
Our family usually eats two meals a day, and Tony takes almost all the breakfast.
He said, "Because you cook more lunches and dinners than I do, I volunteered to be responsible for all the breakfasts." The logic was the same as his sister Kathy.
That is: just because you are willing to do it, I can't take it for granted, everything is ready-made.
Tony always compliments me every time I eat a meal.
Sometimes I am afraid that he will perfunctory me and ask him: "Is it really that delicious?" He said: "Really, because you used special seasoning." I asked: "What seasoning?" He said: "Love "Sometimes I think about my mother, my grandma, grandma, aunt, aunt and aunts, who have cooked for their family for a lifetime, how many words of thanks and praise have I heard?
Tony and Casey told me that they grew up in a labor-loving family, so they respect laborers.
Their family, who experienced poverty during the Great Depression in the United States, moved to the sparsely populated Maine for a living, building roads and bridges for a living.
When they were young, each child was required to work as much as he could from the age of three.
There are three boys and three girls in the family, who have been trained to use various tools, repair various instruments, and engage in various labors since childhood.
When I was at Kathy's house, I often saw her paint the walls by herself; she knew what paint to buy at the supermarket, what kind of roller brush to use, and how many times to brush; Drill holes in steel with an electric drill and make art yourself with a grinding wheel.
She said: "I have practiced this at home since I was a child. In our family, both girls and boys have to learn to use tools. If you need something, the first consideration is whether you can make one yourself; if you can't do it, you will consider it. Buy." In this family, the only preferential treatment for girls is that they don't have to work on the construction site, while boys from the age of 15 have to go to the construction site to work in the summer vacation.
The three brothers are sitting together now, often laughing about how they spent the money they earned from their part-time jobs.
By the time Tony became a father, that education continued, and there was always something new.
His five children, three boys and two girls, each learn to drive, he taught them by hand; he required them not only to be able to drive, but also to repair cars, and taught them personally.
The first cars of the five children are all second-hand cars, and he took the children to a second-hand car dealer to choose them.
For the first computer of the five children, he took the children to buy various parts and taught them to assemble them by themselves.
As for the daily chores, from cooking to washing the dishes to vacuuming, every child has to do it all over again.
Tony said that every child has complained: "Why do I have to do everything?!" Of course, when the children are older, they understand the benefits of labor, and they teach their children the same way.
After the child is 16 years old, he has to do odd jobs by himself.
Almost every child has worked in a restaurant, long or short.
The youngest daughter used to work in an ice cream shop.
Once, we went to her store for ice cream, and she very proudly showed us how to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen, which was like giving us a chemistry lab class.
Labor is the best way to improve their ability and self-confidence, so let them try a lot to help them discover their own potential and interests.
More importantly, they can be more acutely aware of the needs of society and future trends, so as to make wiser choices for their lives.
Text / Yi Ye Wen (now living in the United States)
Sweden
Handicraft classes and home economics classes can "solve parents' worries"
My admiration and confusion about the hands-on ability of young Swedish people first came from a conversation I learned in a Swedish training class about a couple buying furniture at IKEA and assembling it home.
This article sparked a lively discussion in our class of students from all over the world - some thought it was a big head, some praised, some thought it was a piece of cake... But what impressed me the most was the chance to see it In a youth program, two junior high school girls bought clothes for a rehearsal and discussed how to change the discounted clothes to make them more suitable.
After returning home, the two started the sewing machine and quickly changed their clothes, and the reporter next to them didn't take offense at all.
Looking at these two little girls, I thought about the sewing machine in my closet that my mother didn't take out after she left. When I was a mother at the beginning, I regretted that I didn't learn my mother's craftsmanship, while thinking about my thread. How can a mother who is sewed crookedly teach her children these things in the future... I expect my child to grow up to be an independent person who does not need to depend on others; I expect her to be both civil and martial and have the ability to use hands.
I didn’t expect the school to solve this problem for me: I took her to do all kinds of small handicrafts when I was a child. In the third grade of elementary school, she had systematic handicraft classes. One class was divided into two halves. Sewing and woodworking took turns. Boys and girls are equal. treatment.
As a mom, I started picking up gifts on and off, from neatly sewn pouches, keychains, dolls, to fancy sweatpants coming out of a sewing machine.
My daughter gradually added many nouns to her mouth, and from time to time, she would discuss with me what themes to choose from and what kind of collocation she wanted before starting each new work.
She was also very interested in the woodworking class, and the family began to buy the butter knife she made, the kitchen paper holder, the candle holder, the tickle, and even a folding reclining chair. Become one of my favorite gifts.
In the last year of junior high school, I started designing and making jewelry in the handcraft class. The little girl chose and designed a pair of beautiful metal rings for a long time. I was so envious that I went to check the course fees for jewelry making in the evening school...
The home economics class that started in the sixth grade was an eye-opener, but also a mixed blessing.
Teachers began to take students in the kitchen to systematically teach kitchen knowledge, and teach various basic common sense of consumer finance and so on.
Not only learn to bake and cook, but also regularly sell the food you make, and the money raised is used for class activities.
What makes me happy is that my daughter's cooking skills have improved greatly, and she often shares delicious food; but the embarrassing headache is that the little girl began to cook strictly according to the recipe and process, and she was quite critical of my unstable and free-spirited cooking style. Ask me how many grams and how many milliliters I used...
The earliest handicraft classes in Sweden were strongly gendered. It was only in the late 1960s that they were promoted from advocacy to formal legislation, and boys and girls were taught completely equally.
Barbro, who is in his 70s, is the backbone of the generation that built modern Swedish society, "born in the 1940s", and the term in Sweden has become a spiritual symbol.
Speaking of handicraft classes, she once sighed with me more than once, how much envy boys could go to learn woodworking when she was in elementary school and junior high school, but she had to sew with a group of girls honestly.
It was her father, an independent worker who built a holiday cabin for his family since laying foundations, who taught her how to use tools, and who taught her that you can do all the things a boy can do.
After she entered university in 1967, she discovered that a female classmate in her class had protested to the school when she was in middle school, and won the opportunity for herself to be the only female student to learn woodworking and machinery with a group of boys.
In the ten years I've known Barbro, every time I bring up the school's handicraft class, she regrets why she didn't think of fighting for this right.
Because of the company of peers and learning together, the acquisition of such life skills is no longer like the teaching of my parents when I was growing up, but a memory with my classmates, which is really a blessing.
In the process of growing up with her, I was also nurtured and influenced, from a "nerd" who spent a few hours installing an IKEA desk, to a "female man" capable of writing and martial arts, the most brilliant The result is that together with his daughter and three generations of Barbro, they have built a lattice window grille that everyone in the residential area admires and can withstand the test of storms.
These will be fond memories of my daughter growing up, and I hope she can enjoy hands-on fun all her life.
Text / Akka (now living in Sweden)