The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its
individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the
kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center,
this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but
furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl
will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it.
It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school
course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is
strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school
grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told
why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is
served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see
things straight and the hand to steadiness.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger
duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many
dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to
give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the
love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the
girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing
housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic
science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be
ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to
be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is
unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and
beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more
professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by
unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable,
overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a
child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home
with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer
drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will
be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of
trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large
part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day
can come only when women through universal home-making education
push forward and demand this better management of the home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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