Incorporating health as a subject in schools
Saturday, 20 November 2010
The education minister’s recent assurance that the government would take measures to raise awareness about health and other matters, by incorporating the subjects in school textbooks, is more than welcome. This announcement came in the course of his inaugural address at a programme to prevent diabetes, organised recently ( 11 Nov 2010) by the Bangladesh Diabetic Society at BIRDEM. At the moment, some 7.0 million people in the country are said to suffer from this metabolic disease which, by the next decade, experts say, might reach 11million, if people remain unaware, even though its causes are not yet fully understood.
Diabetes-related health problems are essentially systemic, affecting the entire mind-body, and awareness early on could certainly ward off a lot of complications in those who are susceptible. But the minister’s expressed intention of including an essay (‘rochona’) or two about the disease in the school textbooks would hardly do justice to the concept of true ‘education’. This piecemeal approach may provide the usual rote answers to set questions (the intellect-deadening formula of the national education system that we seem to be stuck in ), but it will not provide the in-depth knowledge that ten to twelve years of course study is expected to give young people, to help them live wholesome lives.
A health science course, incorporating both primary and secondary levels, is what we badly need, to equip the young with the knowledge and skills to take care of themselves as well as the environment around them. This alone would make a world of difference, for then school graduates would be as equipped as ‘barefoot doctors’, as it were, able to cope with most of their primary health care needs, including balanced nutrition and positive thinking. Given the fact that about 80 per cent of the disease burden -- both physical and mental disease -- in countries like ours can be traced to nutritional deficiences, poor hygiene, unsafe water and lack of sanitation, public knowledge about these aspects should be prioritized.
We could start with schools. A comprehensive and compulsory ‘health science for schools’, could achieve for the nation a great deal more than expensively trained medical specialists, claim some ‘health for all’ activists.
That may not be an exaggeration, provided the content and method of teaching the health science course is knowledge-based, not just designed to pass ludicrous tests like MCQ , True/False or Fill-in the-blanks ! A step by step comprehensive course, from classes one to eight at least, if not twelve, should prepare school graduates with the required education to turn them into brigades of barefoot doctors -- with just a little training afterwards. Then it would be quite easy to address Bangladesh’s health crisis with only a handful of specialists at the top and a reasonable number of general practitioners spread out across the country.
If the health science course is comparable to the ones used by ‘world class’ school examination boards, and is taught and learnt seriously, students could be counted upon not only for their own primary health care but for their family and community’s care as well. School education, in the ideal, should be the foundation on which a nation’s human resource -- a healthy resource -- can be built. Education would therefore remain inadequate if such a vital subject like health science is left out of the school curriculum.
Health, as the Alma Ata declaration said decades ago, is not merely the absence of disease but physical and mental well-being as well -- throughout life, starting from the womb, through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, into ripe old age. As such, a well- thought out health science course, should be an essential input, instead of the perfunctory essay or two that the good minister has in mind. Another ‘subject’ that the Education Minister wants included in text books is ‘eve-teasing’, a pattern of predatory and violent behaviour against girls and women, that some young men have been displaying lately. In all likelihood, most of these cases may be plain testosterone-driven thuggery, triggered by different stimuli like drugs or ‘blue’ films. But that this is very much a ‘health’ problem -- both mental and ‘reproductive health’ of the perpetrators -- seems to have been missed.
In a generally ‘conservative’ society like ours, dispassionate discussion of human sexuality is hardly an easy affair. Most regard this basic instinct as taboo, or, at worst, a rather prurient quest. Both attitudes are bad for human society and experts in adolescent reproductive health have for years been trying to overcome this psycho-social hurdle. One of their strategies has been to get a cross section of decision and opinion-makers, including parents and teachers, to address the hitherto unmentionable and awkward issue so that adolescent children can be helped to cope with the hormones surging through their minds and bodies without going berserk. And if they are idle, the devil can take over.
Bangladesh is brimming with young people just stepping into puberty. And reaching them with the right kind of information -- about their blooming bodies and exploring minds -- is crucial, if diseases and disabilities linked with their reproductive phase in life are to be avoided. Nearly 25 per cent of the nation was said to be in the 10 to 19 age bracket about a decade ago, which meant that some thirty million youngsters at the start of this millennium were at the most impressionable and vulnerable age. Puberty is the period when young people need the most guidance, specially with regard to their reproductive health, so that they may be spared the hazards of groping their way into sexual activity, be it within socially recognized liaisons or otherwise.
Considering that about seventy per cent of the girls in rural Bangladesh are married off by the age of fifteen, and that mortality of adolescent would-be-mothers and new-borns are scandalously high, the importance of adolescent-friendly sexual-health services couldn’t be clearer. Reproductive-health is therefore a very important aspect that needs to be included in textbooks to educate the young of both genders on how best to respond responsibly to their own reproductive needs and urges.In cultures like ours, self-discipline, restraint and religious guidance are still said to play a greater role in keeping the young on the right path, but times have changed. A law to book delinquents may deter would-be offenders but more is needed to get them thinking positively about gender relations. Counselling and proper education on sexual health is essential if the young are to grow into robust and mutually respectful men and women.
Diabetes-related health problems are essentially systemic, affecting the entire mind-body, and awareness early on could certainly ward off a lot of complications in those who are susceptible. But the minister’s expressed intention of including an essay (‘rochona’) or two about the disease in the school textbooks would hardly do justice to the concept of true ‘education’. This piecemeal approach may provide the usual rote answers to set questions (the intellect-deadening formula of the national education system that we seem to be stuck in ), but it will not provide the in-depth knowledge that ten to twelve years of course study is expected to give young people, to help them live wholesome lives.
A health science course, incorporating both primary and secondary levels, is what we badly need, to equip the young with the knowledge and skills to take care of themselves as well as the environment around them. This alone would make a world of difference, for then school graduates would be as equipped as ‘barefoot doctors’, as it were, able to cope with most of their primary health care needs, including balanced nutrition and positive thinking. Given the fact that about 80 per cent of the disease burden -- both physical and mental disease -- in countries like ours can be traced to nutritional deficiences, poor hygiene, unsafe water and lack of sanitation, public knowledge about these aspects should be prioritized.
We could start with schools. A comprehensive and compulsory ‘health science for schools’, could achieve for the nation a great deal more than expensively trained medical specialists, claim some ‘health for all’ activists.
That may not be an exaggeration, provided the content and method of teaching the health science course is knowledge-based, not just designed to pass ludicrous tests like MCQ , True/False or Fill-in the-blanks ! A step by step comprehensive course, from classes one to eight at least, if not twelve, should prepare school graduates with the required education to turn them into brigades of barefoot doctors -- with just a little training afterwards. Then it would be quite easy to address Bangladesh’s health crisis with only a handful of specialists at the top and a reasonable number of general practitioners spread out across the country.
If the health science course is comparable to the ones used by ‘world class’ school examination boards, and is taught and learnt seriously, students could be counted upon not only for their own primary health care but for their family and community’s care as well. School education, in the ideal, should be the foundation on which a nation’s human resource -- a healthy resource -- can be built. Education would therefore remain inadequate if such a vital subject like health science is left out of the school curriculum.
Health, as the Alma Ata declaration said decades ago, is not merely the absence of disease but physical and mental well-being as well -- throughout life, starting from the womb, through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, into ripe old age. As such, a well- thought out health science course, should be an essential input, instead of the perfunctory essay or two that the good minister has in mind. Another ‘subject’ that the Education Minister wants included in text books is ‘eve-teasing’, a pattern of predatory and violent behaviour against girls and women, that some young men have been displaying lately. In all likelihood, most of these cases may be plain testosterone-driven thuggery, triggered by different stimuli like drugs or ‘blue’ films. But that this is very much a ‘health’ problem -- both mental and ‘reproductive health’ of the perpetrators -- seems to have been missed.
In a generally ‘conservative’ society like ours, dispassionate discussion of human sexuality is hardly an easy affair. Most regard this basic instinct as taboo, or, at worst, a rather prurient quest. Both attitudes are bad for human society and experts in adolescent reproductive health have for years been trying to overcome this psycho-social hurdle. One of their strategies has been to get a cross section of decision and opinion-makers, including parents and teachers, to address the hitherto unmentionable and awkward issue so that adolescent children can be helped to cope with the hormones surging through their minds and bodies without going berserk. And if they are idle, the devil can take over.
Bangladesh is brimming with young people just stepping into puberty. And reaching them with the right kind of information -- about their blooming bodies and exploring minds -- is crucial, if diseases and disabilities linked with their reproductive phase in life are to be avoided. Nearly 25 per cent of the nation was said to be in the 10 to 19 age bracket about a decade ago, which meant that some thirty million youngsters at the start of this millennium were at the most impressionable and vulnerable age. Puberty is the period when young people need the most guidance, specially with regard to their reproductive health, so that they may be spared the hazards of groping their way into sexual activity, be it within socially recognized liaisons or otherwise.
Considering that about seventy per cent of the girls in rural Bangladesh are married off by the age of fifteen, and that mortality of adolescent would-be-mothers and new-borns are scandalously high, the importance of adolescent-friendly sexual-health services couldn’t be clearer. Reproductive-health is therefore a very important aspect that needs to be included in textbooks to educate the young of both genders on how best to respond responsibly to their own reproductive needs and urges.In cultures like ours, self-discipline, restraint and religious guidance are still said to play a greater role in keeping the young on the right path, but times have changed. A law to book delinquents may deter would-be offenders but more is needed to get them thinking positively about gender relations. Counselling and proper education on sexual health is essential if the young are to grow into robust and mutually respectful men and women.