As an A Level I chose to do Home Economics. Now I didn't think that this course would be all about cooking and it isn't. When I told people Home Economics was one of my choices, their response was 'Isn't that just cooking?' No it isn't. There is a lot more to it then just cooking. I cooked around 10 times throughout the 2 years I took that subject and 5 of them were for my course work.
Many people nowadays don't know how to cook the basics because schools are cutting it out of their national curriculum, now I know it isn't up to the school what goes onto the national curriculum but it is an important life skill to have. I was shocked when I was told that some people will rely on ready meals to be able to survive and didn't believe that people didn't know how to cook even scrambled eggs.
But it is a harsh reality that everyone needs to realise, as each generation goes through school, they aren't being taught the basic of survival pretty much. The government was looking at getting rid of Home Economics as an a level and slowly wiping it out of the school system completely.
Some of you may be asking, what is Home Economics?
Well, Home Economics is a subject that doesn't only look at some cooking skills, it looks at the home life and problems within the society. In lower 6th form the key topics that we looked at were key issues in society including homelessness, problems with the NHS and the strain it is under due to obesity and smoking, sustainable living, types of housing, how to pay mortgages, types of schemes available for different people, the benefits that are available such as job seekers allowance, different types of payment methods and some of the risk involved, budgeting, sales of goods acts and all the things put in place for these as well as a wide range of other things.
In upper 6th form we had a coursework section, with this we could choose anything we wanted! I looked at sugar, we had someone look at fruit and veg, different types of meat, sugar substitutes and functional foods. This taught us a lot and it was something that we were happy to learn about as we had chosen it ourselves. The other section was all about health and safety, developments in the food industry, different types of advertisment, what nutrients and minerals different groups need so we looked at babies, children, teenagers, adults and pregnant women just to name a few. We also looked at the different food groups such as fish, diary, eggs and meat and what nutrients they provided and how much.
Whilst many people may not even bother to read all of that I hope that some of you will and realise how good this subject is. Before I took this subject I had no idea how mortgage worked, that there were so many schemes in place to help people buy their first house or what the food industry is really like. It has been a real eye opener for me in so many different ways and I hope that some of you care enough about the younger generations to be able to start talking with other parents about this subject and get them interested. If enough people want this subject then the government has to at least listen to our needs, isn't that what they're supposed to be there for anyway? I know some of you will comment about how good/bad the government is, but that isn't what this post is about. It's about helping the future generations of this world survive and not live off ready meals that have a high percentage of saturated fats and salt.