Many collegiate institutions, such as Drexel Institute, Pratt Institute, and Armour Institute, have given the subject careful attention for a number of years. Even in high schools and grammar schools this work is making its way. To-day a study of cooking is required of every girl in the Boston common schools, as well as in other schools in Massachusetts. In the Providence Manual Training High School, Miss Abbie L. Marlatt, a graduate of the Kansas Agricultural College, conducts a most admirable course in domestic science, covering a period of four years. In the Brookline (Massachusetts) public schools, Mrs. Alice P. Norton, a graduate of Smith College, has arranged and conducts a comprehensive course of study in this department, beginning with the sixth grade and continuing through the high school. This course, as arranged and conducted by her, is a good example of what might be done in the public schools of every city, without crowding out anything of importance or overburdening the pupils. In the sixth grade, where it begins, it only occupies one hour per week; in the seventh and eighth grades, two hours per week; and in the ninth, one hour per week.
The course is systematic and comprehensive, beginnnig with the general care of the house in the sixth grade and progressing to food principles taught with practical tests in a way to become ineradicably fixed in the young mind. For instance, the effect of different temperatures upon albuminous foods and upon starchy foods, with practical illustrations of albuminous cookery and starch cookery, are given, as also tests for proteid, starch, and sugar. Each step forward in the study of the chemistry of foods is always illustrated by the cooking of some dish.
In Brookline, when the pupil reaches the high school, she has already been instructed in many more things concerning the house and the preparation of food, with the reason why, than the majority of young ladies know when they enter upon the life occupation of mistress of a home.
In the high school this instruction is still further continued to include general chemistry, with special reference to its household application, sanitation, domestic art, clothing, household biology, problems of the home, including the place of the home in society, household management, and domestic service.
Thus this college woman is impressing herself upon the future by realizing in a practical, comprehensive way that the time and place to get a right knowledge of home making, based upon the latest and best gleaned from many fields, is at that time of their lives when our future home makers are to be reached collectively, and when they are at a good age to receive such instruction, being comparatively undistracted by other occupations and preconceived ideas.
