Economical impacts in the implementation of home-ed education

The practice of enforcing the learnings of general life skills have long played a critical role in fostering the development of our youth, serving as a productive and functional factor in maintaining or raising the prosperity, stability and socioeconomic development of countries as well as communities. By providing students with the appropriate resources for learning general skills such as but not limited to household matters, financial literacy, agriculture, ecology and basic hygiene; we are able to promote prosocial behaviors which will contribute to greater academic success.

In spite of the aforementioned benefits, the application of such programs are not commonly present  as it possesses a critical issue, namely inadequate funding. The often agitated question regarding the lack of financial backup is that the funding provided for educational institutions are tied to the amount of property taxes, which are, in turn, a direct function of local wealth- creating a correlation between the level of wealth and average income in communities to the amount of funding received by said institutions, causing school funding disparity to have decreased by an estimated 19-22% since year 1990  and is currently the lowest that it has been since researchers first started measuring it 30 years ago.

Solutions for this issue will require the financial support of government bodies, recognizing the importance and contributions of home economics and allocating budgets and subsidies for its implementation. Furthermore, collaboration and partnerships with local organizations, with emphasis to those relating to or functioning within the field of home economics may also be utilized to maintain affordability.

To further expand on the impacts of home economics, we must first recognize the role it plays in aspects of everyday life, academics, sustainability and global economics.

In terms of everyday life, Rationalizing and modernizing forces have been influencing its organization in families and communities ever since the second half of the last century, encouraging efficiency in reso urce management, though not to disregard that utilized resources came mostly in the form of human labor, optimized at the cost of the overuse of natural resources. Furthermore, increasing use of industrial food can be found amongst all consumers on a global scale. Nevertheless,  home  economics  has proved to have contained many valuable teachings for citizens alike, promoting the sustenance of balanced diets in spite of the flood of pre-prepared meals and drinks containing excess amounts of fat, glucose and harmful additives.

With that being said, a question remains of how everyday life may contribute or be of relation to the aforementioned cycle of consumption. How may our general habits affect and thus promote sustainable consumption patterns?

In regards to the question, it is vital that we foremost place emphasis on the main areas of daily life, mainly housing, food and mobility and recognizing how we may place efforts in promoting responsible consumption within the following products, activities and services : 

1. Housing, which focuses on the general variety of the residence as well as the type and level of amenities needed to maintain them such as heating isolations; 

2. Mobility, which focuses on modes of commuting

3. Food, focusing on the methods of production and distances between production and consumption. 

With respect to the mentioned areas, implementation of home economics may rise efforts developing said patterns; applying methods to promote sustainability; such as but not limited to:  urban communities built with aims to reduce average living space taken/person, incentives to reduce distance between producers and consumers, and the development of social networks.

As a whole, the implementation of Home Economics, with its strong history of successes and failures, has served as a vital role for development communities and educational centers, and activities performed on the program should  actively engage and incorporate the promotion of sustainable  consumption  from  a  home  economics  perspective. Moreover, home economics contains many foundations in academics as well as everyday life, being inextricable from curricula and policy development; playing an important part in tackling knowledge-practice gaps observed in the establishment of sustainable consumption patterns.

With that being said, in order to maximize socioeconomic development in countries and communities, home economics should address these following issues present in the world and relating to home economic values; namely : 

1.  Environmental issues relating to resource scarcity and global inequity, 

2. The need of development in the social service sector to accommodate with technological advancements, 

3. Its contributions to non market-based activities such as but not limited to household chores and private agriculture;

4. And so on.