Небольшой английский текст для практики чтения и перевода.
Why have cookery lessons become “food technology”?
Cooking is cool, except in the classroom. There, the National Curriculum may ask a pupil to “design and evaluate” a biscuit. Can things be changed?
Christina Hardyment reports
I suppose every evangelist thinks their subject should be taught in schools. But I challenge any proselytizer for Greek or woodwork to find quite as many good reasons for teaching their subject as there are for lessons in cooking. Children no longer learn to cook at mother’s knee. Mother’s knee is out working. Few learn to cook at school, though there are shining exceptions. School food rooms and kitchens have been sacrificed for computer rooms, where you can teach more subjects with a lot less mess and expense. A “food technology” class these days is more likely to consist of designing a pizza topping on a screen than making pizza.
I find the thought of a child going home with a print-out of a pizza profoundly depressing. But teaching cooking, real cooking, is not cheap. You need a high teacher/pupil ratio because it can be dangerous, you need ingredients and you need to comply with hygiene and safety regulations. And teachers can barely get the National Curriculum into the timetable, never mind any extras.
Children both boys and girls, love cooking. It is creative. They go home with something to show Mum. They can succeed at it and feel pleased with themselves. It helps them like school.
Quite apart from what cooking can do for the individual, think about what a population of competent cooks could do for the nation. For the poor or unemployed, the ability to make something nutritious, instead of living on expensive ready-made meals or unhealthy biscuits would surely be reflected in a reduced NHS bill.
Then, if only we thought of cooking as a respectable job, we might reduce unemployment by employing our own people in our restaurants and hotels, rather than importing labour.
Most of all, good cooking leads to good eating, and good eating leads to social intercourse. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “The family that eats together stays together”, but it must help.
In my trade, some of the youngsters we interview for jobs have no social skills whatsoever. They have never sat down to a meal and talked. They have hardly ever had to communicate face to face. They watch TV, play computer games, listen to their Walkman, talk to their mates on the telephone, but none of that is any kind of preparation for persuading an employer to take them on, or for making a customer feel relaxed and welcome in a restaurant. It cannot be an accident that food-loving Italians are better at family life, better at the restaurant trade and generally seem to have a jollier time than we do.
People are beginning to bang the drum — the Royal Society of Arts is holding a convention this week called Cooking Counts; the recently formed Good Food Foundation is concentrating its efforts on cooking in schools; the National Curriculum Assessment Authority is thinking about it and Food Technology teachers are lobbying hard.
But even if we fail to get any more than the limited amount of cooking into secondary school education recommended under the technology syllabus, could we not teach cooking, real hands-on cooking, to all primary school children, for, say, an hour a week? Apart from anything else, if boys learn to cook as tots, they might be more willing to pick up the wooden spoon — and tea towel — when they grow up.