Voici one snarky piece that trashes the very thought of a sit-down meal.
No one shows off about their dining rooms anymore. Dining rooms were for hostess trolleys and hot plates, vol-au-vents and souffles. They required a huge amount of effort. If you have a dining room you can't serve the carrots out of the saucepan.
You have to put them in a serving dish. Even the ice-cream has to be decanted and, along with the rest of the food, either has to be trundled along a corridor or dispatched through a hatch in the wall.
The washing-up involved in having a dining room is horrendous. Most are also filled with silver which means several hours a week polishing the candelabra. And the cutlery. You must have serious cutlery, as well as a proper dinner service.
I suppose a "straw man" argument is applicable to a room as well as a person, since no one has polished a candelabra this side of the pond in lo, fifty years. Still, if one is assuaging the guilt attached to the demise of the family meal, then comparing [what was once ubiquitously known as] "communion the domestic church" to "lifestyles of the rich and irrelevant" is de rigeur.
Of course, sentimentality may creep in to the jettisoning of this hallowed room.
But like chandeliers and chaise longues, once we have forsaken this seeming anachronism we will miss it. The dining room inspires good manners. Here you can talk late into the night without being distracted by the sight of all the washing-up and there is no one to watch you unwrap the M & S red cabbage and pass it off as your own.
You see, the very walls of the dining room allowed for pretence, indulgence and deceit. Alas, if one considered the countless family conversations, the shared delight in age-old recipes, the decompression at the end of hectic days, the solidarity, unconditional love, and sense of belonging, then the demise of the concept of family meals wouldn't make for such sophistry.
Let's see. If the choice is between "dining rooms" and "modern life," and the latter is clearly the winner, then perhaps it's more of an indictment of the writer and her generation than she would care to admit. Thankfully, a couple of quotes at the end breathe sanity into the piece, though the trend is clearly going against them.
Comments
“People have realized that the complete removal of the feminine element from the Christian message is a shortcoming from an anthropological viewpoint. It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity."
This is just another of the unintended consequences of the cultural acceptance of contraception and abortion! Men's sexuality has been robbed of its creative essence. It is now viewed as something that imposes a burden on women (when conception happens to occur), something used to control women or something that is purely recreational. Why would men bother?? In taking away their responsibility, we've also robbed them of their significance! In the big picture of humanity, men have been made into nothing more than a nuisance women have to figure out how to control in order to bring about the next generation. Men don't see it as their task to protect the vulnerable because they see themselves as the vulnerable ones. A few well preserved vials of sperm would make men entirely obsolete in the world's ethos today!!
That is astounding Robin, and good for you for standing up. At the heart of that matter, I think, is even worse than a gender mixing message. There is an increased sharper and sharper focus on the "self." Solid Catholic teaching returns our focus away from ourselves to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The original sin, Eve denied her womanhood when she desired to be like "gods." Since the only god she knew was the Father. Where was Adam? He stood impotent... in other words, they were divorced. There's a young girl at Robin's son's high school who was just told that she is the center of the universe and it's a tragic disservice to her.
Ditto what Mary said! A lot of high schools have very poor math and science depts, for boys and girls. I also am educated as a chemical engineer, but chose to teach the two years before we had children because its hours were more suited to spending time with children. (I was looking ahead). When it came time and I was pregnant with our first, I realized that I did not want to leave him with someone else, and was able to stay home full time. I am not sure it would have been that easy if we were used to another engineering income and not just a private school teacher income. Also some of my first job offers were out on oil rigs - I had no interest in that at all even though I enjoyed my engineering classes and did well in them. No one discouraged me from an engineering job, on the contrary I got a lot of flack for my decision not to pursue an engineering career.
I've been lurking, but this is one that irritates me. Beats the heck out of me what these "barriers" are. I was educated as a chemical engineer, where 1/3 of our class was women. However, in electrical engineering, only 1 or 2 out of 30 were women. Is it possible that women are Just Not Interested in some areas? Nah, it must be The Man keeping us down so we must legislate (and, I agree -- when they say "legistlate", I hear "quota"). And actually, I have a friend that was also a chemical engineer. When she lost her job, she decided not to go back into engineering and started working from home so she could spend more time with her 3 kids. Also, if nothing else, there are all kinds of incentives for women to enter science and engineering -- scholarships not available to men, guaranteed housing on campuses that do not guarantee housing to the general population, etc. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that schools in general are not preparing students for the hard sciences. It is truly a sad state of affairs, the lack of science education these days.