{"id":6182,"date":"2014-04-09T14:21:18","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T18:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=6182"},"modified":"2014-04-23T14:22:29","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T18:22:29","slug":"politics-as-usual-teach-a-man-to-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/politics-as-usual-teach-a-man-to-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"POLITICS AS USUAL: Teach a man to fish…"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can you cook? Not cordon-bleu cooking, I am asking about basic cooking. Can you make mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables and some oven-baked chicken breasts without poisoning your family or burning the house down?
\nCan you sew? If the hem on your skirt or pants fell down, could you fix it? Can you sew a button on?
\nDo you know how to make a menu? A grocery list? A household budget?
\nI dare say that if you are under the age of 30, chances are your answers to most, if not all, of the questions above are \u201cno\u201d. I don\u2019t say that with smugness or early stage old fart-ism. I make the statement as an alarming observation about how poorly the next generation has been prepared for life on their own.
\nBasic life skills have simply not been taught.
\nLet me restate that. Basics of all sorts have not been taught. Basic numeracy skills, for example, are also lacking. Ask the kid at Starbucks to give you back your change without checking the cash register and you\u2019ll know what I mean.
\nDo you know how kids are taught math today? Discovery math, where they \u201cdiscover\u201d how to solve the math problem. Seriously? And they wonder why kids are doing so poorly.
\nYou can\u2019t lay the lack of life preparation at the feet of exhausted parents. Yes, parents play a role in teaching their own kids about how to make their way in life. But, they are not wholly responsible. Nor should they be.
\nSchools, churches, Scouts, Girl Guides and after school programs have always played a direct role in preparing kids for life. But these old systems, the safety nets are frayed and in some cases gone entirely. Long gone.
\nHome economics \u2013 do you remember that? I do. In high school we were taught how to prepare meals, mend clothes, clean the house, set the table \u2013 basic home keeping skills. It wasn\u2019t anything fancy, but it was extremely helpful both to me now and for my family at the time.
\nHome economics was dropped from most high school curricula over a decade ago. As a result, we have an entire generation of kids who do not have even basic food literacy skills, let alone know how to cook. Or clean. Or sew. Or budget. And that serves no one\u2019s best interest.
\nToday, both parents work in most households. Many households are headed by only one parent \u2013 doubling the amount of work that one parent must do. Kids should be helping out at home \u2013 but they\u2019re not. It\u2019s not laziness. They don\u2019t know how and parents are too tired at the end of the day to teach them.
\nBoth of my parents worked. Consequently, my sisters and I helped out around the house. We made dinners, we did the dishes, we cleaned our own rooms. All of my friends did the same to varying degrees.
\nChores were a normal part of life. How did they become a relic of the past? Why do kids \u2013 assuming they aren\u2019t engaged in some tightly scripted after school activity \u2013 sit around playing Halo 4, waiting for mom or dad to come home with pizza?
\nWhy aren\u2019t they getting dinner ready? I think that if they are old enough to be home by themselves, they are old enough to get dinner ready.
\nThat may sound old-fashioned. So be it. It\u2019s true. How are they supposed to learn to cook if they never have to do it for themselves?
\nTo quote the proverb, \u201cGive a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.\u201d
\nYouth today need the right tools to build a decent life for themselves. It\u2019s in our best interest to ensure that they have those tools.
\nWith youth unemployment rates hovering at 20 \u2013 25% for those under 24 years old, it is possible that we will have a generation that will not have the same standard of living as their parents.
\nThey\u2019re going to need to know how to live on a budget, how to shop for groceries, how to make food from scratch. In short, they\u2019re going to need a course in home economics.
\nPersonally, I think it\u2019s time to put it back on the statutory curriculum.
\nUntil next week, stay informed, stay involved because this is, after all, Our Town.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alison Collins-Mrakas Can you cook? Not cordon-bleu cooking, I am asking about basic cooking. Can you make mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables and some oven-baked chicken breasts without poisoning your family or burning the house down? Can you sew? If the hem on your skirt or pants fell down, could you fix it? Can you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-1BI","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-11 05:07:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}