Changing face of Home Economics: Career is focus

HOUSTON — In just 40 minutes, Cafe Mirabeau would fill with hungry patrons — and every dish needed to be delectable, every plate a model of perfect presentation.

A squadron of white-jacketed cooks scurried from stove to cutting board, stirring, saucing, dicing, whipping. Thin curls of steam carried tempting hints: freshly simmered sweet potato and pear soup, grilled pork tenderloin, homemade waffles topped with vanilla ice cream and caramel-pecan syrup.

An episode of "Top Chef?" The dinner rush at a five-star restaurant?

Not quite.

Cafe Mirabeau is inside Lamar High School in Houston, part of the subject formerly known as home economics.

No longer geared toward preparing future housewives with tuna casserole recipes and sewing skills, the subject now known as family and consumer sciences focuses instead on equipping students with more contemporary real-world skills.

In the culinary arts class at Lamar, for example, students learn the craft of high-end cookery along with food science and business management basics.

In the Humble Independent School District just outside Houston, students can choose from teacher training courses, hotel management and architectural design. Classes in Polk County, Fla., include early childhood development and fashion design. At Menomomie High School in Wisconsin, an advanced food science class merges cooking, science and mathematics.

"In this day and age, everyone runs a home and manages kids, and women are working alongside men," said Becky Hunt, the Humble district's director of career and technical education. "It takes two incomes to live on, so we know these students are going to be wage earners. It's not about staying home."

In 1950, about one-third of women participated in the labor force. Today, nearly 60 percent of women are working or looking for work, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Women also make up more than half of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations.

At the same time, boys made up 37 percent of high school family and consumer sciences students in 2002, according to a survey done by the American Association of Family & Consumer Sciences. In 1959, 48 percent of secondary school girls were enrolled in home economics classes, while only 1.3 percent of boys were enrolled.

On the first day of school, Dorothea Polydoros, who teaches the Lamar High School class, likes to whip out a bright yellow sun dress she stitched as a class project about three decades ago.

"This is what Home Ec used to be," Miss Poly, as she is known in the school, declares. "It's a whole new world now."