Chuck

Again, these classes are still out there, but nothing like they used to be, where you could go into a high school or a middle school and there was a simulated kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of different stoves and ovens and refrigerators.

And people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby.

And in some cases, taking care of a real baby, too, because...

This stuff got intense sometimes.

Yeah, apparently at some of the colleges that were teaching home ec, they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students to just basically practice on.

And apparently there's a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger, who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics.

And she said that for adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd show up and be like, you got any one of them babies that's been in the home economic classes?

Heck yeah, man.

Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for just with complete attention and care by women who were working in like the cutting edge of child rearing.

So they were much more desirable than the non-home ec babies, it turns out.

For sure.

Apparently, those eggs would get on custodians' nerves enough that they switch to flour or sugar.

which also had the added benefit of heft.

And I saw in some educational magazine, I can't remember, but they would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin tones over the flour or sugar.

And that sometimes if you forgot your kid, whether it was an egg or a sack of flour or something, in your locker, you might be forced to write a paper on child abuse or something like that.

So

The whole point was to just teach high school kids you don't want to have a baby at this period in your life.

Maybe ever.

Like if the class was hard enough, maybe they're like, I'm never having a kid.

But certainly not through my teen years.