Cookery classes are back

Lots of other things to blog… but this was interesting to me. I’ll come back to those other things, this is a quicky…

Around 20 years ago, or so, it was felt that teaching children cookery in schools was a tad outdated - and not very useful for their learning and development. So, a lot of schools dropped it - and in many places where it was compulsory (for one or two years) it became optional. Now the government has realised that teaching children how to cook is actually quite important - not even necessarily as a skill, but because of the associated potential health benefits of having children know about food, with learning that is driven from practice rather than the theoretical and industrially focussed ‘food production’ taught in food technology classes.

In other words….

Oops.

Some quotes from the BBC article:

The subject has suffered in recent years, according to the inspectorate, Ofsted, which traced the problem back to the introduction of the national curriculum in 1992.

This put food in with design and technology - alongside resistant materials, systems and textiles.

Ofsted said pupils were often taught “trivia” such as “arranging toppings decoratively on a pizza” or using complex engineering computer-aided design software to produce simple drawings of icing on cakes.

CAD to draw icing for a cake! If ever there was inappropriate and pointless use of technology in the classroom, this is it. If anyone has nominations for even more pointless use of technology in the classroom, please do let me know.

And this one, from the government, which conflicts with my own recollection:

But officials at the schools department say it is a myth that there was once a “golden age” when everyone learnt to cook at school. This was never the case, they say.

It *was* compulsory in my school in S1 & S2 years, for *all* students. Perhaps a little bit of defensive spinning going on here?

Games angle? Hmm, I could perhaps suggest ‘Cooking Mama’ as a way to save on expensive ovens, but I won’t.