THE LOST GRAMMAR OF MAINTENANCE — PART 3 OF 3 This is the final essay in a series about what we lost when we stopped maintaining things, and who profited from the loss. Part 1: Make Do and Mend (Loss) | Part 2: The Franchise of Permission (Legal Response) | Part 3: The Disappearance of Domestic Science (Root Cause)
I. The Textbook
The word appears on the spine in a typeface that assumes seriousness: Housecraft.
It is a school textbook — Gillian Mary Sutton's Housecraft Today, published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in 1968 as part of the Secondary Certificate Series.1 Two volumes, 191 pages, illustrated. It was designed for examination-level students in British secondary schools — young people sitting certificates in a subject that no longer exists, using a word that no longer appears in any curriculum in England.
Housecraft. Hold the word. It is not a word we use anymore, and the reason we do not use it is the subject of this essay. But notice what the word contains. A household. A craft. The household as a subject of craft — as something that could be studied, practised, refined. Not the household as a site of drudgery. Not the household as confinement. The household as a discipline. The premise that maintaining a life is a skill, and that skills can be taught.
The Domestic Economy School at the Regent Street Polytechnic opened in 1894 — a dedicated institution with a curriculum that reads, now, like a document from a civilisation that trusted its citizens with their own lives.2 The syllabus: cookery, including continental cooking and icing techniques. Laundry. Domestic hygiene. Housework and household management. Nursing. Needlework. Upholstery and soft furnishings.2 By 1922, the School Certificate Examination Group IV included housecraft, needlework, and hygiene.2 In Ireland, the Intermediate Certificate textbook listed its subjects directly on the cover: Cookery, Needlework, Hygiene including Simple First-Aid, Housecraft.3
Each subject heading is a competence. Each competence was taught to an entire generation of students. Each was examined, graded, transmitted. The knowledge moved from institution to population in a chain as systematic as any other subject on the timetable.
I want you to read those subject headings again. Cookery. Needlework. Hygiene. Laundry. Household management. Nursing. Upholstery.
Now hold them against your own education. Hold them against what you know and what you do not know. The distance between that syllabus and your own competence is not a personal failing. It is a historical fact — the record of decisions made by identifiable people in identifiable institutions across identifiable decades. The textbook is the evidence. Its table of contents is the map of what was taken.
A syllabus is a blueprint for a person. Change the syllabus and you change the person. Remove the syllabus and you remove the possibility.
II. The Renaming
The word "domestic" entered English from the Latin domesticus — belonging to the household, from domus, the house.4 The household was the original site of competence: cooking, mending, maintaining, budgeting. To be domestic was to be capable within the space where life is lived. The word carried no shame until the twentieth century made it synonymous with confinement. The feminists were right to resist the confinement. But the word itself remembers something the curriculum forgot: that competence within the household is not servitude. It is the foundation of self-sufficiency. We discarded the competence to escape the confinement, and in doing so delivered ourselves to a different confinement altogether.
The timeline is forensic, and it matters.
In the mid-1800s, Domestic Economy was introduced to British state schools to teach cooking, needlework, and laundry — initially framed as improving basic living standards among the working classes.5 The subject grew. By the middle of the twentieth century, Domestic Science was a standard examination subject in secondary schools across Britain, with dedicated teachers, dedicated classrooms, and dedicated equipment.
It was also available only to girls. In mixed schools, this was a customary restriction. In single-sex schools, it was structural. Boys took woodwork and metalwork. Girls took Domestic Science. The division was indefensible, and we should be precise about why: it confined the competence of household maintenance to one gender while excluding the other, reinforcing a patriarchal arrangement that served neither.
The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it unlawful for educational establishments to discriminate on the grounds of sex in admissions or access to courses.6 During the Lords debate on the earlier Sex Discrimination Bill, Viscount Colville of Culross expressed the hope that "boys should cook and that girls should know how to mend fuses."6 The ambition was universalisation. Teach everyone. Open the classroom in both directions. Make housecraft a human competence, not a gendered one.
Betty Friedan had diagnosed the confinement in 1963. "Each suburban wife struggled with it alone," she wrote in The Feminine Mystique. "As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"7 The critique was entirely legitimate. Compulsory domesticity was a prison, and the demand for freedom from it was just.
But we must hold two truths here, and the holding is the hardest thing this essay asks.
The feminist critique was right. And the system's response to it was not what the feminists asked for. They asked: teach everyone. The system answered: teach no one.
What followed the 1975 Act was not universalisation. It was a series of renamings, each one narrowing the scope of what was taught while broadening the label under which it was taught — until the subject had been diluted into nothing.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Domestic Science was renamed Home Economics.5 In 1988, the Education Reform Act introduced the National Curriculum.8 Before that Act, several separate practical subjects existed in British secondary schools: CDT — Craft, Design and Technology, which encompassed what had been woodwork, metalwork, and technical drawing — alongside Home Economics, Textiles, and Electronics.9 Each was a named subject with its own teachers, its own examination, its own tradition. From 1989, all were absorbed into the single heading of "Design and Technology."9
Read the names of the dead. Woodwork. Metalwork. Needlework. Technical Drawing. Home Economics. Electronics. Each name is a competence. Each competence was taught. Each was removed — not by being declared worthless but by being merged into a category so broad it could mean anything, and therefore taught nothing specific.
In the House of Lords debate on the Education Reform Bill, on 18 April 1988, Lord Ritchie of Dundee warned precisely what would happen. He asked how the government could fail to name the teaching of subjects including "home economics" and those addressing "parenthood, child care, family responsibility, budget balancing" as foundation subjects.10 He warned that without explicit inclusion, schools would focus only on tested, named subjects — effectively abandoning practical and life skills education.10
He was prophetic. He was ignored.
As reported by BBC Radio 4's Food Programme, the Thatcher government in its final year sought to create "technologists" skilled at designing theoretical frozen pizzas rather than people capable of preparing actual meals.11 "Food Technology" replaced cooking. The 2007 New Labour curriculum update went further: GCSE students were assessed on packaging, labelling, target markets, and "a food product which was suitable for mass marketing."5 This is not education for competence. It is education for consumption.
In 2014, food education was made compulsory for ages five to fourteen as "Cooking and Nutrition."12 But when the subject became compulsory, only a quarter of primary schools had a teaching kitchen.12 More than half gave fewer than ten hours of food teaching annually.13 Seventy-six percent of secondary teachers reported that pupil numbers continuing food and nutrition beyond Year 8 were in decline.13
From 2016, the Home Economics GCSE was replaced by "Food Preparation and Nutrition."14 The Food A-level had been cancelled the previous year.14 The rationale, according to the Department for Education: top universities offering food science and nutrition courses told DfE they were looking for students with science qualifications, rather than food-related A-levels.14 The dead end was formalised. A student could begin but had nowhere to take it.
The answer to a gendered education was a universal one. What we got instead was an empty one.
III. The Ledger
The feminist goal of equality was answered not by redistribution of competence but by elimination of competence — and someone profited from every skill that disappeared.
This is the section that opens the ledger. I am not arguing conspiracy. No ready meal manufacturer lobbied Parliament to remove Home Economics from the curriculum. No fast fashion brand petitioned the Board of Education to abolish needlework. The evidence for orchestrated corporate lobbying does not exist, and I will not pretend it does. What I am arguing is architecture — the structural outcome of decisions whose beneficiaries were not their architects.
Every competence a curriculum removes becomes a product someone sells. This is not conspiracy. It is architecture.
The textbook taught cookery. The population that was never taught to cook from whole ingredients is now served by a ready meal market valued at billions of pounds — approaching seven billion pounds, depending on how you draw the boundaries around chilled, frozen, and ambient prepared meals.15 The growth of that market began before the curriculum was fully dismantled, driven by freezer adoption, women entering the workforce, and the microwave oven. We should be honest about this: the ready meal market was growing in the 1970s, before the 1988 Act. The curriculum did not create the market. But its removal eliminated the only institutional mechanism that could have maintained the alternative. Finland faced the same workforce changes, the same consumer pressures, the same microwave — and preserved its curriculum. We will return to Finland.
The textbook taught needlework. In 2022, according to WRAP — the UK's authoritative waste data body — Britain bought 1.42 million tonnes of new textile products.16 The average person discards thirty-five textile items per year.16 Of textiles disposed in general waste, eighty-four percent are incinerated; eleven percent go to landfill.16 Average clothing cost: sixteen pounds seventy per item, a figure that has decreased two percent since 2015.16 The clothes are cheaper. The skills to maintain them are gone. The maths of that exchange is the ledger.
The textbook taught household management. Forty-four percent of UK adults — 23.3 million people — are classified as having poor financial literacy, according to the abrdn Savings Ladder Index.17 Household budgeting was a core competence of the Domestic Science syllabus. Its removal did not cause financial illiteracy alone — many factors contribute. But a curriculum that once taught budget balancing to every student now teaches it to none, and 23.3 million adults cannot manage their household finances. The structural consistency with The Case does not require proof of sole causation. It requires only that we notice.
The textbook taught practical maintenance. A 2024 survey of 2,012 UK adults by Halfords found that twenty-one percent of Generation Z could not identify a spanner; thirty percent could not identify a flathead screwdriver.18 Generation Z spend thirteen hundred pounds a year on professionals for tasks they could, by Halfords' estimation, "probably do themselves" — compared to two hundred and fifty-three pounds for Baby Boomers.18 Sixty-nine percent of all UK adults agree practical skills are declining among younger generations.18
Thirteen hundred pounds a year. Per person. For the privilege of not knowing what a spanner is.
We have become a civilisation that insures its purchases against itself. In 2022, according to market research data, the UK extended warranty market was valued at approximately USD 3.54 billion — roughly three billion pounds — with 8.6 million policies sold.19 Each policy is a bet by a consumer against the product they just bought: a bet that it will fail, and that when it fails, they will be unable to fix it. The warranty does not repair the product. It funds the replacement. The business model depends on a population that has been conditioned to expect failure and accept helplessness.
Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, argued that primitive accumulation is not a one-time historical event but a recurring process — that the seventeenth-century enclosures of common land have been repeated across centuries and domains.20 The first essay in this series drew the parallel between physical enclosure and cognitive enclosure. This essay names the mechanism. The Domestic Science curriculum was a cognitive commons — a body of shared practical knowledge, transmitted through institutions, available to everyone. Its closure followed the same logic as the enclosure of common land: self-sufficient people are bad consumers. Remove the self-sufficiency, and you create a population that must purchase what it once provided for itself.
Ivan Illich called the endpoint "radical monopoly" — not the dominance of one brand but the condition where "one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition."21 When someone says "I'll just order takeaway" about a missing dinner, they are speaking from inside this radical monopoly. Not because takeaway is wrong. Because cooking has been rendered progressively unimaginable — not as a practice but as a default. The alternative has been enclosed.
Ursula Huws, in Feminist Review, documented that the tasks of housework have undergone "dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour."22 The skills were removed. The gendered burden of purchasing their replacements remained. The feminist goal of equality was not served by the curriculum's disappearance. It was betrayed by it. The reform failed on feminist terms as well as on educational ones — because it replaced unpaid domestic competence with paid consumer dependency while keeping the responsibility gendered.
The Design and Technology GCSE — the umbrella subject that absorbed the practical crafts — has itself been declining. D&T entries fell from 437,000 in 2004 to 77,000 in 2025: an eighty-two percent collapse.9 The subject that replaced the subjects is itself disappearing. The renaming was the first enclosure. The decline is the second. The original subjects are not just renamed. They are being erased even under the new name.
Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, documented the parallel in America: "Shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become 'knowledge workers.'"23 He traced this to Frederick Winslow Taylor's principle that "all possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department."23 The separation of thinking from doing was not British. It was industrial. It was systemic. And it was global.
Three continents. Seven decades. The same outcome. The skills that taught a population to maintain a life were removed from the institutions that transmitted them, and the markets that grew in the vacuum were not designed by the removers but rewarded by the removal. The curriculum was not dismantled by a villain. It was dismantled by a system that profits from incompetence — each actor following a locally rational incentive, no coordinating committee, no memo marked "Operation De-Skill." Just convergence. Architecture, not conspiracy.
IV. The Grammar
Not everyone removed it.
In the 1850s, a Finnish clergyman named Uno Cygnaeus submitted reform proposals for Finnish primary education. In 1866, the Finnish government made sloyd — from the Swedish slojd, meaning craft or skill — compulsory for boys in rural schools and for male teacher trainees.24 The policy was later universalised. Cygnaeus's philosophy was built on a Pestalozzian principle that the English-speaking world would spend the next century dismantling: the integration of "head, heart, and hand" — the conviction that intellectual, moral, and manual development are inseparable.2425 Working with your hands was not menial labour. It was how you became a whole person.
One hundred and sixty years later, all Finnish pupils — regardless of gender — study both textile crafts and woodworking for the first seven years of comprehensive school, approximately two hours per week.26 In successive curriculum reforms, this has been consolidated into a single combined compulsory subject for all students.26 Home Economics is mandatory in grade seven, with optional continuation in grades eight and nine.26 The tradition is unbroken. The grammar is intact.
In Sweden, Otto Salomon established a school for teachers at the Naas estate in the 1870s, with the purpose, as educational researchers have documented, of employing "handicraft as a platform in general education to build the character of the child, encouraging moral behaviour, greater intelligence and industriousness."27 The Swedish national curriculum still includes sloyd as a compulsory subject: students take part in wood, metal, and textile crafts, receiving one grade that covers the subject as a whole.28 Sloyd remains compulsory in Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian schools.
The objection is predictable, and we should name it before it arrives. Finland has 5.5 million people. Britain has sixty-seven million. Finnish teachers hold Masters degrees. The educational traditions are structurally different. You cannot compare them.
The objection that Finland is too different to compare is deployed against every lesson Finland teaches. Its function is to excuse inaction, not to advance understanding. Both are advanced post-industrial economies with universal education systems that faced the same pressures of consumer culture, technological change, and workforce restructuring. Finland chose to preserve craft education as compulsory. Britain chose to absorb and diminish it. Sweden, which is larger and more diverse than Finland, also preserved sloyd. The relevant comparison is not system-wide. It is subject-specific. The question is not "why is Finland different from Britain?" The question is: why did Finland keep what Britain removed?
A civilisation that must legislate the right to repair its possessions and has no curriculum that teaches it how is a civilisation that has forgotten what education is for.
The second essay in this series ended with a sentence about what has not yet begun. This is what has not yet begun: not the legislation — the legislation exists. Not the repair cafes — they are growing. Not the YouTube tutorials — they multiply daily, and their very multiplication is the evidence of the gap, not the bridge across it. A tutorial reaches the person who already knows they need the skill. A curriculum reaches every child regardless of parental initiative, internet access, or personal motivation. The institutional pipeline is what was severed. The institutional pipeline is what must be rebuilt.
We are, it turns out, a country that invented the Industrial Revolution and now needs a Finnish word to describe the idea that children should learn to use their hands.
The textbook is still here. Housecraft Today, Gillian Mary Sutton, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1968. It sits in catalogues, in library archives, on the shelves of secondhand dealers. Its subject headings — the competences it was designed to transmit — are a curriculum for a person who can maintain a life. Cookery. Needlework. Hygiene. Household management. The word on the spine — Housecraft — is a word that contains a conviction: that the household is a site of skill, and that skill is worth teaching.
We were all, once, meant to be that person. Not the gendered version — not the version confined to girls while boys learned metalwork. The universal version. The one the feminists asked for. The one the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 opened the door to, and the curriculum reforms that followed walked through that door and emptied the room behind it.
The first essay asked the reader to see what was lost. The second asked the reader to see that the legal response cannot restore it. This essay asks the reader to see the mechanism — the curriculum that was closed, the pipeline that was severed, the competences that became markets.
The textbook's table of contents reads like a letter from a civilisation that trusted its citizens with their own lives. We could write that letter again. Whether we will is not a question of policy. It is not a question of funding, though both are required. It is a question of what we believe education is for — whether its purpose is to produce consumers who purchase competence from the market, or citizens who carry competence within themselves.
That question is the oldest question in education, and we have been answering it, for forty years, by removing the subject that once posed it.
Dominic Vale writes about why we are the way we are.
What Changes
This is not a piece about what to do. It is a piece about what to see. But seeing changes things, and three things are worth seeing clearly.
The disappearance was not natural. The next time you hear someone say "kids these days can't cook" or "nobody knows how to fix anything anymore," notice the framing. It presents the loss as a generational failure — as though young people chose not to learn. They did not choose. The choice was made in policy documents, in curriculum committees, in Education Reform Bills. The incompetence is designed, not inherited. When you see the design, you stop blaming the generation.
The textbook is a test. Look up the syllabus of a Domestic Science course from the 1960s or 1970s. Read the subject headings. Ask yourself how many of those competences you possess. The distance between that syllabus and your own knowledge is not a measure of progress. It is a measure of what was enclosed — and what was sold back to you.
The curriculum is the lever. Repair cafes rebuild skills one Saturday at a time. YouTube tutorials transmit knowledge one video at a time. But a curriculum reaches every child. It is the only mechanism that operates at the scale of the problem. Finland proves it can be done. The question is whether we believe it is worth doing — whether we believe, as Cygnaeus believed, that working with your hands is not an alternative to thinking but a form of it.