6 - Education for healthy futures: Health promotion and life skills training

Summary

Guiding concepts and a coherent strategy for the health education of children and youth are just beginning to emerge. The inclusion of health education as a serious and integral part of the school curriculum is a relatively new idea in the United States. Until recently, health education classes for adolescents were delegated to physical education staff and were viewed narrowly as add-ons that, although they had no academic merit, could serve to satisfy mandates in response to alarms and fears such as those created to address problems of alcohol or drug use or teenage pregnancy, or to satisfy parental wishes for options such as driver education. Fortunately, a new awareness of the centrality of health education for adolescents is coinciding with serious efforts at school reform. This chapter discusses the content and implementation of the new approaches to health education and life skills training programs for adolescents and draws on the current state of knowledge from the behavioral sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and pedagogy.

Adolescent health status

In part, the narrow view of adolescent health education reflected a widespread misconception that adolescence is the healthiest period of the life span; as a result, there were no educational needs to be served. Several factors contributed to this erroneous view. First, adolescents appear to be healthier than they are in reality because they have avoided using health care services for reasons of access, cost, consent, and privacy. Second, many of their medical disorders, including scoliosis, hypertension, diabetes, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, are not associated with visible symptoms or evident mortality. Finally, the rise of adolescent problem behaviors was not universally seen as a health problem.