[Illustration:  A girls’ sewing class.  Work in sewing offers unlimited possibilities]

The question arises:  How much of her housekeeping training should a girl receive before entering upon her high-school course?  After careful consideration it seems wise to urge that the greater part of the practical household work be taught during the period from eleven to fourteen.  This does not imply that homemaking training should cease at fourteen, but rather that after that age attention shall be centered upon the more difficult aspects of the subject—­upon “household economics” rather than the skillful doing of household tasks.

In view, however, of the fact that the majority of girls never reach the high school, every bit of household science which they can grasp should be given them in the elementary school.  Knowing how to do is only part of the housekeeper’s work.  Knowing what and when to do is quite as important.  Elementary study of food values is quite as comprehensible as elementary algebra.  Home sanitation and decoration are no harder to understand than commercial geography.  The principles of infant feeding and care may be grasped by any girl who can successfully study civil government or grammar.

Shall we then crowd out commercial geography or government or grammar to make room for these homemaking studies?  Not necessarily, although, if it came to a choice, much might be said for the practical studies in learning to live.  Fortunately it need not come to a choice.  There is room for both.  We must, however, learn to adapt existing courses to the requirements of girls.

[Illustration:  Courtesy of L.A.  Alderman A model school home where all the practical details of housekeeping are taught]

[Illustration:  A domestic science class at work in the model school home shown above]

There is arithmetic, for instance.  Most of us have already learned to skip judiciously the pages in the textbook which deal with compound proportion, averaging payments, partial payments, and cube root.  Now we must learn to insert the keeping of household accounts; the study of apportioning incomes; the scientific spending of a dollar in food or clothing value; the relative advantage of cash or credit systems of paying the running expenses of a home; the dangers of the “easy-payment plan”; the cost of running an automobile; comparison with the upkeep of a horse and wagon; comparison of the two from the point of view of their usefulness to a family; mortgaging homes, what it means, and what it costs to borrow; when borrowing is justified; the accumulation of interest in a savings account; the comparative financial advantage of renting and owning a home; the cost of building houses of various sorts; the cost of securing, under varying conditions, a water supply in the country home; and other locally important problems.  We already have “applied science” in our courses, and we are making a strenuous effort to apply arithmetic; but we have not usually tried to apply it to the education of the prospective homemaker.