As they face returning to school in a few short days after the long summer holiday, many primary and secondary school children will be armed with vital new skills - learned at various cook schools throughout Scotland.

Special children's courses have been experiencing unprecedented popularity at the Edinburgh School of Food and Wine near Kirkliston, Nick Nairn's cook schools in Aberdeen and Port of Menteith, at the Cookery School in Glasgow, and others. I, for one, find this astonishing. Could it be that we're seeing the longed-for food revolution taking root before our eyes - and against all odds?

Teaching basic cookery skills is only part of Home Economics in the Curriculum for Excellence, where the emphasis is on the contribution the subject can make to turning children into successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. Increasingly, home eccies departments are working with other departments such as art, geography, and science to produce and market, say, a food product for sale in the school canteen.

The ideal - supported by Nairn's Scottish Food Family group and Mike Small's Fife Diet, as well as the Scottish Government - is that every primary school child should be able to make a pot of soup before they graduate to secondary school.

But patchy resources in primaries (insufficient budgets to buy in food, lack of availability of trained teachers, zero cooking equipment) mean fulfilling the ideal isn't always guaranteed.

The new government-supported Cooking Bus, which visits primary schools and public events, offers a full kitchen with professionally trained staff for a range of cookery lessons for children, and is proving popular in filling the gap for those who can't afford the fees of private outfits. Nairn tells me he's just secured a £4500 grant from the Food for Thought fund to purchase mobile cooking equipment to take into primary schools around Buchlyvie, where he plans to give free cookery lessons.

It's estimated that the cooking skills traditionally passed down from parent to child have been lost over at least two generations. So if the private cook schools are satisfying increased demand alongside the subsidised cooking bus, surely this indicates a raised awareness among parents of the need for their children to be properly educated about food.

Ian Pirrie of the Edinburgh School of Food and Wine at Newliston says his £150 three-day course for 9-14 year olds, which ran earlier this week, was massively oversubscribed and that all 12 places were taken by boys. Nairn has taught more than 100 children over the summer - almost a 100% increase on last year even at £79 a three-hour session. He says when children cook with their peers, rather than at home with their parents, cooking suddenly becomes "cool" and even competitive. "It triggers something in them," he says.

Brian Hannan's three-hour primary school courses at the Cookery School in Glasgow, at £15 a head, stand somewhere in the middle. They are heavily subsidised by him, an altruistic move motivated by the desire to change poor eating habits. The £250 five-day course for secondary pupils is based on sophisticated adult menus of salmon en croute, butternut squash risotto, apple tarte tatin. The school sees some 500 children through its doors each year and he'd love to do more if he could afford it.

While lamenting the lack of cookery and changes to how home economics is taught in state schools, Hannan agrees with the aims of Curriculum for Excellence: it can impart valuable life skills such as leadership, decision-making, team spirit and self-confidence. Even making a lemon meringue pie requires at least four skills: deciding how lemony/sweet it should be; gauging sufficient measurements to fill a set number of pastry cases; planning how long they should be in the oven; and accepting there is benefit in admitting mistakes and learning from them. In corporate group sessions, he's fascinated to see how obvious it becomes through cooking that some people in promoted posts have no idea about how to motivate and lead their staff.

But it's not just about that. Like Nairn, he says the astonishment and excitement shown by children who have no set ideas about food is overwhelming. "We find that children adore food when they have no preconceptions about it, and are more interested and engage more freely when they haven't got their parents hovering over them and telling them what to do. The dining table at home becomes a psychological battlefield when parents try to impose their own views on children. That's why we don't allow parents into the classes; they need to come from the perspective of innocence."

Parents usually buy or cook what their child asks for; if they ask for something they've learned about by themselves, then there's a good chance it will be healthier than what their parents would have chosen. And so the cycle begins afresh.

Here's hoping today's young people become tomorrow's new food educators.