海角大神

Students may not come to Donna Barnett鈥檚 consumer science classes to get more of what they鈥檝e seen on TV and YouTube. They鈥檙e not necessarily looking to serve up the 鈥淲eirdest Food You Ever Ate,鈥� for instance, or to learn 鈥淗ow to Cook Road Kill.鈥� And they may not want to become another Alon Shaya, renowned New Orleans鈥� Domenica chef and one of Ms. Barnett鈥檚 former students. But students at Harriton High School, part of聽Lower Merion School District聽in suburban Philadelphia, line up for her classes nonetheless.聽 Some are driven by their romanticism of the foodie culture, some by the down economy.聽

Here, as in many high schools, 鈥渉ome economics鈥� has evolved. Cooking has gone from a lesson in making the supermarket 鈥渟pecial of the week鈥� feed the greatest number of young 鈥榰ns as many tolerable meals as possible, to a lesson in feeding oneself well. That鈥檚 because, often, no one else is home for dinner in this wealthy school district, explains Ms. Barnett, who has taught there for 25 years. Personal finance class has changed too. Once a lesson in how to balance a checkbook, it鈥檚 now peopled by students who 鈥渁ll want to get rich on Wall Street,鈥� she says. And child development, once the incubator of would-be mommies, now is populated by future doctors, nurses, and teachers.聽

Home Economics and its wood shop counterpart have traditionally been electives at Harriton. And if they historically appealed mainly to a non-academic crowd, they鈥檝e now gone mainstream. Students who might have been considered too 鈥渟mart鈥� to learn nutrition and were steered to, well, calculus, are now hedging their career bets. One former student, now at an Ivy league university, told the teacher 鈥淚 wanted to learn to bake in case I can鈥檛 get a job as an engineer.鈥�

The public schools aren鈥檛 the only ones seeing interest in cooking, fashion design, home finance, and such.聽The Wall Street Journal聽 recently toward haute curriculum in private academies and schools, where ambitious is normally associated with academic. Elsewhere, schools whose students might seem most likely to use the skills on the job are often either too poor to offer them or too focused on academic skills to want the distraction.聽

Ann Pagano, Director of Development at the Freire Charter School, in Philadelphia, which serves many underprivileged students,聽says, 鈥渙ur focus is academic rigor.鈥� Students arrive lagging in math and reading and need to double up in those areas in order to prepare for college. In聽some schools聽where money or class time is in short supply,聽extracurricular clubs can fill in some of the gaps.聽

Whether paying high private school tuition or high school tax bills, parents might be expected to prefer something more for their money than lessons in changing diapers in a day care or busing tables at an in-school restaurant. Not so, says聽Ivy Cohn, whose son Ross, a senior at Harriton, and daughter Alyssa, a freshman, both took Barnett鈥檚 "Basic Foods and Nutrition" class. Ms. Cohn has been delighted with the results 鈥� the fact that her once-picky-eater son has developed an expanding palate, and that her daughter has become more helpful and adept in the kitchen.聽

鈥淏efore I really knew what the course was about, I asked my son, 鈥榃hy are you taking this course?鈥欌�� She soon saw it as a happy, useful change of pace from the stress of the classroom. Besides, she says, 鈥淓veryone needs to eat. They have to learn these things.鈥�

Practical might yet prove to be a career maker in a culture where recession and unemployment has shredded the expectations of many who thought college would be their ticket. At Harriton, even those cooking students who are not particularly interested in food come for the management and entrepreneurial skills they gain by working and competing for jobs in the functioning restaurant they run as part of the international foods class.聽

Barnett says many parents in the wealthy school district have taken big financial hits during the recent recession, and shifted their kids out of the numerous private schools in the area into the public schools like Harriton. Without the family ship coming in as they鈥檇 planned, they seem eager, she said, for their kids to learn how to survive on their own, be aware of college costs and think career.聽

Their thinking dovetails with the still-emerging maker movement/self-sufficiency mindset, which has increasing numbers of millennials growing their own foods, making their own crafts, and starting their own factories and restaurants. The recession, combined with the depersonalization experienced in some stalwart academic-corporate-professional institutions that once welcomed their parents鈥� generation now combine to make the independent lifestyle seem less risky for today鈥檚 young adults.

And If nothing else, the traditional arts of the home can still be used there 鈥� at home. Anna O鈥橦ora, whose daughter studied wood shop in the district decades ago, is still reaping the benefits. Her daughter, she explains, learned her way around a house and hasn鈥檛 forgotten.聽

鈥淪he fixes things a lot.鈥�