The inadequacy of the “one-portion” method of teaching girls to cook has aroused serious thought, and remedies of various sorts have been applied.  You know, perhaps, the story of the Chicago cooking-school student who “had to make seven omelets in succession at home last night” because one egg would not make enough omelet for the family.  The first remedy tried was cooking for the school lunch room.  This was, however, usually going from one extreme to the other, since the lunch room is as a rule maintained only in large schools.  “Institutional cooking,” some one calls it.  Instead of one egg-cooking, it became one-hundred-egg cooking, and the difficulty of the average student in adapting school methods to family use was not by any means at an end.

The Central High School of Newark, New Jersey, has solved its problem by putting its girls to work, not at the task of providing the sandwiches, soups, and other luncheon dishes for its large lunch room, but at providing “family dinners” at twenty-five cents a plate for the faculty of the school.  Other schools follow similar plans.

The grammar-school girls of Leominster, Massachusetts, serve luncheon to a limited number every day at their domestic science house.  Here the girls do the marketing, cook and serve the meal, and keep the various rooms of the house in order.  In Montclair, New Jersey, work of this same sort is done.  In each of these cases the cooking is done as it would have to be in the home, not for one person, nor for hundreds, but for approximately a family-sized group.

Sewing courses also grow more and more practical.  In some schools the girls make their own graduating dresses as a final test of their ability.  Courses are definite, and girls completing them will have definite knowledge of everyday processes of hand sewing.  The schools which add to their hand-sewing courses well-planned practice in the use of the sewing machine are further adding to the accomplishment of their girls.  Those which go farther still and teach garment planning and making may consider their sewing courses fairly complete.

[Illustration:  Teachers’ luncheon cooked and served by pupils at the Clinton Kelly School, Portland, Oregon.  Other schools have adopted similar plans for teaching girls how to cook]

The formation of ideals must go hand in hand with practice in manual processes.  The girl must learn to know good work when she sees it, to know a properly constructed garment from one carelessly put together, and to value good work and construction.

Time was when domestic science meant sewing and cooking, and these alone.  That time, however, is past.  The care of a house is practically taught in many schools throughout the country by the maintenance of a model apartment in or near the school building.  In Public School No. 7, New York City, grammar-school girls, many of whom are of foreign parentage and tradition, are thus introduced to the American ideal of living.  The school is thus establishing standards of equipment, of food, of service, of comfortable living, that tend to Americanize quite as much as the establishment of standards of speech, of business methods, or of civic duties.  The work done in this school is typical of that prevailing in hundreds of towns and cities.