By first teaching the science and responsibilities of caring for each life, human ecology education empowers individuals to build collective human sustainability. Because the lessons are lived daily, the healthy rhythms and habits of life within family and community are learned, repeated in different contexts, shared for life, and naturally inherited by the next generation, making the impact of human ecology educational programs exponential and generationally ongoing.
Human ecology education emphasizes reciprocal influence and interdependence—the “we, us, and our” of our lives. It enables us to identify with others as fellow humans, rather than just their characteristics, such as race, age, height, gender, or ethnicity. It goes beyond self-focused professional education by considering human relationships in the context of the other sixteen hours of the day.
To quote Anna Trupiano, writing for the Michigan Daily, “The fact of the matter is, nothing truly prepares us for college, and a lot of us end up ‘winging it’ just as I have. And once we’re in college, we are met with the same dilemma—college doesn’t equip us for the rest of our lives.”
A continuous K-12, age-related human ecology program equips students to transition to adulthood with the maturity and skills to live independently while navigating complex social systems at all scales. Graduates will have learned precisely what sharing means and how and why it ultimately benefits them, and they will know how to be self-sufficient and resilient as they face changes in their life stages, unforeseen events, or when personal or local resources diminish.
Evolution of Human Ecology Education
The roots of human ecology education can be traced back to the early Bildung folk education movements in Europe, which share common roots with many human-centered social and political movements worldwide. In 1862, during the early years of the Lincoln administration and the Agricultural Age in America, the Morrill Act was passed. This act traded federal land for the establishment of new state colleges, which offered instruction in agriculture, what came to be known as home economics, and other subjects.
Subsequently, mandatory home economics programs were introduced in the lower grades in public schools for girls, as were the industrial and technological courses for boys. As the Western states developed, the Act enabled homesteaders and rural residents to acquire essential life skills and crop information for achieving self-sufficiency. In the Bildung tradition, practical home economics lessons evolved to include social skills, finance, and civic participation.
Then, in a history-changing moment, during the 1940s, an American, Myles Horton, having become familiar with Danish Bildung education in Europe, established the Highlander School, a folk school in Tennessee, to teach the concepts of the Bildung social agency and empowerment. There, many of the future civil rights leaders of the South, such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, developed their initial ideas of nonviolent protests for civil rights; they learned how to use their personal agency for public social progress, much like the European peasant class had done in Europe. For two centuries, spreading from Denmark, the Scandinavian countries have prioritized this education in their public schools. They also consistently rank at the top of global national happiness and well-being ratings.
The lessons build trust in personal agency, generate empowerment, and drive confidence in moving forward and taking constructive action. Learning in a diverse group environment, such as a school, fosters collective trust and long-term community resilience. As Fortune 500 coach Peggy Klaus writes in her 2008 book, The Hard Truth About Soft Skills, “Soft skills encompass personal, social, communication, and self-management behaviors. They cover a wide spectrum of abilities and traits: being self-aware, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, adaptability, critical thinking, attitude, initiative, empathy, confidence, integrity, self-control, organizational awareness, likability, influence, risk taking, problem solving, leadership, time management, and then some.”
The Gender Thing
Although women have made significant gains throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the gender roles in home economics and agriculture remain essentially unchanged from those of the Agricultural Age. Even though improvements in health (both physical and mental), sanitation, and life span for all people occurred when home economics education was required for girls, the gender disparity between home and work that disadvantaged women earlier still exists today. This is made clear in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024.
Home economics remained an “only girls” program until the 1970s and 80s, then diminished as women worked outside the home and rebelled against the “stir and stitch” image of the unpaid, homebound “happy housewife.” However, as women entered professions by choice or necessity, the quality of home life, health, and household management suffered for many families. Men, focused on their professional lives, were not inclined to share the unpaid workload. Children have paid the price.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Home Economics programs were removed from schools, and their classrooms and funding were redirected to new technology labs in an act of educational eminent domain. Alas, it was an era when administrators were predominantly male. Thereafter, whether cause or correlation, more families began to fragment, child care became a national problem, and more children became physically and mentally disadvantaged.
We are now in the second generation since home, family, and living education were eliminated from schools. We see the fallout in erroneous beliefs about sustaining health, like vaccinating, obesity statistics, shorter life spans, and child depression and violence. The U.S. lags behind other advanced nations in its citizens’ mental and physical health, poverty rates, and life expectancy. Unfortunately, these losses are more impactful because now, society is more complex and challenging. Many fall behind by default. Only recently has personal financial literacy regained some traction in elementary and secondary schools. In the U.S., we follow the money first.
Cornell University met these challenges by developing its human ecology program to rectify this missing life and living education. It also broadened the discipline to address 21st-century human challenges, including limited resources, a growing income disparity, and climate adaptation. Essentially, Cornell combined the practical living knowledge of Home Economics with the self-actualization of Bildung education. They utilized Home Economics’ foundational physical and home health content, and added more interdisciplinary pedagogy in sociology and psychology to address the realities of urbanization and increased population diversity.
Human ecology education is scarce at all levels of the U.S. education system. The Society for Human Ecology recognizes only 43 colleges and universities in the country for their programs, and few of those have departments explicitly named “Human Ecology.” At the secondary level, human ecology is only offered in two public high schools—Syosset and Niskayuna, both in New York—and at Cornell University. While several private schools and international institutions include human ecology content under other titles, one U.S. college, the College of the Atlantic in Maine, considers it so essential to human life that it offers just one major: Human Ecology.
Key Values of Human Ecology Education
Abraham Maslow identifies and prioritizes the stages of shared human needs in his pyramid chart, the “Hierarchy of Needs.” This chart illustrates the human life stages and how each stage corresponds to human growth, from basic life needs to professional esteem and accomplishment, culminating in self-actualization.
While Maslow faced some criticism for how cultural differences influence the hierarchy sequence, human ecology education programs, culturally tailored to fit, provide the ideal vehicle for accomplishing the stages in Maslow’s learning pyramid, from self-sufficiency and resilience to social integration, esteem, and personal empowerment. This sequence is particularly important when applied to children.
Human ecology education guides students through all the complex physical and psycho-social development elements before graduation and adulthood, like navigating social systems, resource management, professional growth, and social ethics. It provides the life knowledge needed at each stage and develops commonly shared social perceptions early on that help bind communities together in adulthood. For each individual, human ecology programs serve as a buffer against the lifetime stress that builds from disadvantage and/or discrimination, leading to health problems and long-term care needs.
Like a ship’s rudder, human ecology education helps students develop an internal decision-making framework during their formative years. In early grades, the focus is on meeting individual needs, such as the knowledge and skills needed for food, clothing, and shelter, to ensure personal health and safety. These are called ‘negative needs’ since we cannot survive without them, but we don’t think about them when they are met.
Human ecology lessons, encompassing both the physical life skills that meet basic needs and the ‘soft’ psycho-social skills, are experiential, allowing students to see and feel the benefits realistically. The classroom and lab activities instill teamwork and spark students’ interest in science, math, economics, and human health. Each sequential course becomes more complex as students mature, their world widens, and they transition to adulthood.
Several organizations offer curricula that help individuals navigate the human ecosystem and develop critical skills, ranging from home and family survival to social mobility and environmental preservation. Examples include Learning Mole, Notes From a Kitchen, and Teach Simple for survival and quality of life skills, ARISE Foundation for social mobility skills, and PBS Learning Media, which is excellent for helping with the great outdoors and climate resilience.
As young adults, students emerge from high schools with human ecology programs resilient and able to recognize opportunities, know where to seek resources, intelligently weigh the pros and cons, and distinguish between short-term and long-term goals. They understand cause and effect, accept responsibility, and welcome change while maintaining their integrity and that of their families. Knowledge of time and task management, consumer protection, law, finance, health, housing, communication, transportation, and navigating our complex state and national social systems is critical for independent living at any age in this multicultural, transitional world. It’s complicated.
These are complex areas of life with high risks; that’s why, beginning early, each person needs formal education on how to navigate their way through this stormy human sea. The alternative, depending on social osmosis or trial and error, is simply dysfunctional. Because many young people lack this life education, more are failing to “launch” their lives. It is often impossible to make up for lost progress later.
Community college human ecology courses are life-savers for first-year students without a K-12 human ecology education, who may be on the doorstep of living alone. New CC students are more likely to be from marginalized groups, complex urban environments, or lower-income levels; many are single parents, new immigrants, formerly institutionalized, veterans, or are simply eighteen and on their own for the first time. These students must quickly learn how to assimilate, become independent, and plan a new life as they transition into a broader, unfamiliar culture to find a future.
The State of Human Ecology Education
Human ecology education, whether via the school of hard knocks or by educational design, is integral to everyone’s success. However, there are problems: First, if offered in higher education, it is usually considered a psycho-social discipline and is fiercely guarded in those departments; therefore, practical life skills are not included. What could be less intellectual than learning to read a food label, for instance, a key lesson, or how to comprehend a lease, or select a health insurance plan to prevent medical bankruptcy, a significant cause of bankruptcies?
Leaving out that content abandons its Home Economics foundation and implies someone else will be at home dealing with those inescapable tasks responsible for good health and sanctuary. That higher education program planning mistake creates hardships for our society, where 30 to 50 percent of people live alone, depending on age.
Secondly, since college students often lack the life skills they should have acquired in elementary and secondary schools, it generates a list of problems for college presidents, including low attendance, decreasing state funding, declining transfer and graduation rates, and costly student support programs, loans, food programs, crisis counseling, and campus crime. Inexplicably, little is on their list for preventing these problems and teaching students how to live independently, stay healthy, and remain resilient and on track.
Although college presidents recognize that teaching is part of their mission, many devote institutional resources to research and career development. Every college or university should require all freshman students, regardless of age, to complete human ecology coursework to graduate or transfer. Human ecology education is life insurance, literally. Incorporating math, English, science, and economics into daily life experiences provides a foundation for and increases comprehension of those academic requirements.
The college problem list, without human ecology, would be tolerable if colleges and universities reached below themselves and supported teaching human ecology in elementary and secondary schools to prevent personal failure, and prepare for college success and independent living. For example, they could train more human ecology teachers, offer in-service human ecology programs for teachers in related disciplines, and expand existing programs to include knowledge of life and living.
The third problem indicating the need for human ecology for all is that those who struggle the most with independent living and homelessness are men. This demographic has traditionally prioritized the value of professional or trade skills over life skills. Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2023, has made gender equity on the home front the focus of her economic research, proving that daily self-sufficiency is a human social and economic necessity, not a gender-based cultural habit. This disconnect, the lack of the skills to meet personal needs, is a causal factor in male crime, violence, and homeless statistics, as well as low graduation rates, shorter life spans, obesity, and increasing health problems.
Colleges do not mandate human ecology as essential to every college education because most believe their schools exist solely for professional education, not personal development. This is the gender thing again from previous eras of female subjugation in which all things regarding personal life practiced at home were unpaid, taught by Mom, or suitable only for the lower grades. However, giving birth does not qualify one to manage a household or raise children, and lower grades no longer offer life education, not since the 1980s. Now, with no one at home, professional child care costs often equal or exceed many mortgage payments, and frequently do not provide a good example of resilience or a positive family life.
There are also problems in the lower grades. They face barriers like limited resources, no time, resistance to change, lack of trained teachers, and the same old gender stereotyping, all of which prevent students from transitioning successfully into adulthood.
As we confront climate change and environmental losses, the need to prevent social and ecological decline through personal education is no longer optional. Preventive education is the long-term, bottom-up approach that is the best choice before facing life’s difficulties. Treatment later to save lives is undoubtedly a needed intervention. Still, it is, by definition, a short-term, top-down triage action. It does not stop problems like homelessness or the growing number of people who are burdened for life with adverse childhood experiences (ACDs) because they lack the childhood care needed to meet health and safety needs.
Nationally, there are additional benefits. Human ecology education provides essential adaptation skills as climate disasters become more frequent and costly. Few states require even basic climate science education, and those that do often overlook the importance of personal climate adaptation skills. Additionally, as we struggle with political fragmentation and a growing income disparity, understanding and acknowledging that all people share similar human needs through human ecology education helps unite voters.
That understanding ties generations and cultures together, building a cohesive nation. Imagine the possibilities for saving lives, preserving nature, and conserving community resources if all local public schools taught students, in realistic and practical terms, how to sustain and share community and cultural resources. The time has come to empower all people with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the 21st century.
This article features excerpts previously published in the chapter “Education and Its Foundational Value for Transforming Society” by Sandra Ericson from What It Takes to be Human, edited by Lene Rachel Andersen (Nordic Bildung, 2024). This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
