When the fun was at its height
McCarthy sat up straight.
The ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary
successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has
been in this case--great enough to be felt all the way around the
world.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume
Tsuda's Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its
graduates are allowed to teach in secondary schools without
further government examination) has installed courses in English
domestic science as well as in the domestic science of Japan.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's
College, of the University of London, has organized a three-year
course leading to the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has
also established a "Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in
which out of fourteen students (in this its first year of
existence) four are graduates of the courses of academic study of
Oxford or Cambridge.
It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.
It has familiarized us with household arts in the public schools,
and we are not astonished to learn that in the public schools of
Boston in every grade above the third, there is sewing or
cooking, or both, for 120 minutes every week for every girl.
It has accustomed us to such news as that in Illinois there are
fifty-eight public high schools in which instruction is offered
in one or more of the three following subjects: Food, Clothing,
or The Home.
It has brought us to the point of expecting domestic science in
all schools of agriculture and of regarding it as natural for the
legislature of Montana to appropriate $50,000 to the State
Agricultural College for a woman's dormitory.
It has cushioned the shock of the tidings from the University of
California to the effect that entrance credit will this fall be
given for high school domestic science work.
We are reduced to equanimity in the face of the fact (which might
have frenzied Alexander Hamilton) that Columbia University,
through its Teachers College, is offering courses in Elementary
Cookery, in Shirt-waists, in Domestic Laundering, and in
Housewifery.
And at last, when we see the resuscitated home making its way
even into the really-truly, more-than-masculinely, academic
Eastern women's colleges, we rush up to the Mike McCarthy of this
case and assure him warmly that we were not deceived for a moment
by his apparent demise, having just learned that President Hazard
of Wellesley College, in her latest commencement address, said:
"I hope the time may soon come when we can have a department of
domestic science, which shall give a sound basis for the problems
of the household "
What does it all mean?
"Fellow-Citizens," said the colored orator reported by Dr. Paul
Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the
palladium of our liberties and the grand pandemonium of
civilization."
But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. AND
SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT SEEMS TO.