180 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



cooking of the home kitchen. School cookery and home cookery 

 were from the first not interchangeable, nor were the pupils 

 urged to use the school cookery at home. 



The idea of cookery in the public schools grew rapidly, but 

 to convert the taxpayers and the boards of education to this 

 new idea we had to make it very academic, and this at once 

 robbed it of its practical aspect. In the end it dwindled down 

 to the immediate establishment of training schools for teachers 

 of domestic science. These teachers in the majority of cases 

 were young and untrained in the practical science of house- 

 wifery; they naturally leaned toward the theoretical work, and 

 many of the reformers who were interested in the movement 

 forgot that domestic science was the training of women for 

 motherhood, and that many of the girls were expected by the 

 taxpayers to be trained for their life occupation. 



The system as founded was not intended to make prodigies 

 of learning of our children. Public schools cannot teach 

 everything that is desirable to know, but as long as it can be 

 said that public school domestic science classes do not give 

 instructions of value to the child for home work, the public 

 school is not doing its best nor doing that for which we are 

 being taxed. 



The proof of these statements is found in the fact that in all 

 these years of domestic science nothing remarkable has occurred 

 in our clumsy system of housekeeping. We find, especially in 

 many of the country districts, the same old-fashioned kitchens 

 with their heavy iron utensils, earthen bowls, wooden washtubs, 

 used with the same old methods that were in vogue in our 

 grandmother's day. In some parts of the United States the 

 railroad companies send practical home women in private cars 

 to country districts to show the housewife how best to save the 

 vegetables and fruits that she has grown and which would 

 otherwise be thrown away. But these methods, as far as I have 

 observed, lack instructions in systematic work which should be 

 done in the average kitchen. It still means a "canning day," 

 and canning should be done when one must necessarily be in 

 the kitchen looking after other work. 



Expensive apparatus does not mean efficiency. The con- 

 version of a workable plain kitchen into an expensive kitchen 



