Chuck

That was the point.

Yeah.

Sure.

And I don't know if it worked or not, but it was a great attempt at the very least.

So by the middle of the 20th century, I think 1959, half of all American girls, half of all the girls in America were taking home ec courses in school.

And then just suddenly, it just dried up.

It wasn't like a faucet got turned off or a light switch was turned, but it...

Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.

Started to go downhill pretty fast in about the early 60s.

And let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about where Home Ec went after, well, the break.

Yeah, and there was an article on Fatherly written by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it back even further.

He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the Vocational and Technical Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said, educators, colleges, you're no longer responsible for figuring out what we want to teach our kids.

We're going to hand this over to business and industry so they can tell us what they want us to teach so that we can basically train workers.

That was the point from that point on for school.

Train workers as much as you can.

And then eventually universities got in on the act and they're like, let's also make these like pipelines to colleges.

So like that's the point of high school is to get into college and we're going to charge them out the yin yang.

So standardization of testing.

was a huge part of it, but that was not the only part.

Like you kind of touched on earlier, Betty Friedan's feminist mystique, which kicked off the second wave of feminism, is very often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a huge chilling effect on home ec classes being taught in high school.