With the ongoing focus on improving and quality of and access to school meals and food education moving up the health agenda, it strikes me as odd that the subject of home economics is rarely mentioned; far less the highly trained specialist teachers who are the products of Scotland’s much-lamented dough schools.
Despite their expertise, these professionals, whose specialist teacher training courses covered such pertinent subjects as food and nutrition (practical and theory), food safety, anatomy and digestion, cell structure, physics and chemistry, sociology and textiles, appear to be excluded from the broad-brush food education that is part of the Curriculum for Excellence.
While dinner ladies are being lionised, domestic science teachers are becoming the dinosaurs of our age. This seems perverse, given the ignorance about food and diet among hoi polloi and the soaring rates of diet-related conditions such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and so on. Those of a certain vintage will remember the subject – now called health and food technology – as domestic science, while others still call it home economics as it was also known. Its ever-changing moniker seems indicative of the unease about the subject’s place in secondary school education.
Some schools, especially those in the more deprived areas, don’t have home economics at all, for a variety of reasons including lack of specialist teachers and a failure to prioritise it by head teachers who aren’t inclined to allocate precious budget for food and cooking, preferring to concentrate on more “academic” subjects.
Those teachers with home economics degrees from dough schools (Colleges of Domestic Science) in Aberdeen, Edinburgh or Glasgow are aged 45 and over and it seems, at the moment, that they’re not being replaced. Younger home economics teachers can do a year’s specialist teacher training provided they have a degree in a relevant subject, which can range from fashion to product development. Many aren’t familiar with handling food, far less cooking.
Strathclyde University offers a post-graduate teacher training course for those with an honours degree in home economics from the University of Abertay; this is one of the few remaining specialist teaching courses in Scotland. Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh’s honours degree course in nutrition and food science is aimed at those interested in a career in the food industry or research.
Scotland’s mighty dough schools no longer exist, but they were once celebrated for the standard of food education they offered trainee secondary school teachers. It’s interesting, if a tad ironic, that the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science, together with the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science, helped roll out the food economy campaign (Scotland) devised by the nutrition expert Dr Douglas Chalmers Watson of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1917, a follow-up to the “voluntary self-restraint” scheme he directed on behalf of the War Savings Committee and which was, in effect, a precursor to food rationing introduced in 1918. Its twin aims were to convince people of the necessity of eating less food, and to show them how to do it.
Time, surely, for an appreciation of those who know how best to teach our teenagers the vital skills of handling, preparing, cooking and enjoying food before they die out altogether.
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