Premium
EDUCATIONAL AND PERSONAL HEALTH *
Author(s) -
Haggard Howard W.
Publication year - 1940
Publication title -
journal of school health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.851
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1746-1561
pISSN - 0022-4391
DOI - 10.1111/j.1746-1561.1940.tb04800.x
Subject(s) - yesterday , hygiene , conviction , health education , appeal , expression (computer science) , public relations , medicine , psychology , medical education , nursing , political science , public health , law , physics , pathology , astronomy , computer science , programming language
A bstract To me health, health conservation, and the humanitarianism of lessened human suffering, represent the highest of all values— values toward whose achievement no educational effort can be too great. And this education for health, as I conceive it, would be something different—vastly different—from the sort of education which most of us received. We once called education for health by the name of hygiene, personal hygiene. But the hygiene we knew in school is a failure. I have taught for many years what is generally known as hygiene, and I have gained from the experience a thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the so‐called rules of health. I should prefer my students to think logically and broadly and particularly socially on matters of health in these years of faddism, quackery, and the commercial exploitation of the health appeal. I should prefer this rather than that they be able to recite glibly the hygienic dicta of today, many of which will surely become the absurdities of tomorrow just as those of yesterday have become the absurdities of today. The great trouble with rules is, first, in any progressive field the rules change, and second, rules are no sounder than the authority of those who formulate them. The education for personal health—the hygiene if you will—which I should wish to see taught is, to use a trite expression, hygiene with a social significance.