Content
Situated in the human sciences, home economics draws from a range of disciplines to achieve optimal and sustainable living for individuals, families, and communities. Historically, home economics has been in the context of the home and household, but this has extended in the 21st century to include the wider living environments as we better understand that the capacities, choices, and priorities of individuals and families impact at all levels, ranging from the household to the local and the global community. Home economists are concerned with promoting and protecting the well-being of individuals, families, and communities; they facilitate the development of attributes for lifelong learning for paid, unpaid, and voluntary work. Home economics professionals are advocates for individuals, families, and communities.
The content of home economics comes from the synthesis of multiple disciplines. This interdisciplinary knowledge is essential because the phenomena and challenges of everyday life are not typically one-dimensional. The content of home economics courses varies, but might include: food, nutrition, and health; personal finance; family resource management; textiles and clothing; shelter and housing; consumerism and consumer science; household management; design and technology; food science and hospitality; human development and family studies; education and community services, among others. The capacity to draw from such disciplinary diversity is a strength of the profession, allowing for the development of specific interpretations of the field, as relevant to the context.
The college which later became Michigan State University began courses in home economics for women in 1870. After the Education Act, 1902, there were in Manchester, England, 13 district evening schools of domestic economy each with 6 hours of teaching per week.
Read more about this topic: Home Economics
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)