Healthy Schools, Great Schools: Education
There's no substitute for education when it comes to keeping kids healthy. Schools are all about education (naturally), but many of them, even great schools, neglect their students when it comes to teaching them how to get and stay healthy.
How much exercise to they need? What kinds of activities can they do on a regular basis to keep themselves healthy? Which foods will help them stay at a healthy weight and which will put on the pounds? How many servings of fruits and vegetables to they need?
All these questions can be answered in school and reinforced at home. The place for this kind of education is in gym class (phys. ed.) and health classes. Some great schools even offer specific healthy nutrition classes before or after school. Home economics (now sometimes known as “family and consumer sciences”) can also be a great place to give students reliable, actionable information about health and nutrition.
Gym Class
Few students, even ones attending great schools, are fans of gym. For the adolescent student, gym class can be a torturous experience, fraught with embarrassment, self-esteem issues, and social awkwardness. Even confident, physically-able students rarely enjoy gym or report seeing any educational or health value in it.
This is a huge missed opportunity for both parents and educators to give students the tools that they need to be healthy, productive members of society for years to come. Gym can be a great venue to talk about how much activity growing and adult bodies need in order to be healthy. Especially in high school, when students are undergoing so many different changes, gym class can be a place to instill confidence and understanding instead of allowing self-doubt to fester.
If you are interested in helping your child's school be a great school, make sure to meet all of their teachers, even the gym teachers. Discuss the curriculum, activities, and setting to make sure that they are up to your demanding standards. If things need to change, work with other parents and concerned educators to make it happen.
Health Class
Health class has become the catch-all roundup of sex education and substance abuse prevention in many American schools. These classes also miss a golden opportunity to teach kids about what kinds of foods constitute a healthy diet and how they can help control their weight and chances of heart disease and other preventable diseases.
There's no substitute for healthy eating at home and parental involvement, but schools have a duty to supplement sexual health education and cautionary information about the effects of various harmful and addictive substances, with the harmful effects of poor diet over the long term. Few students in high school or even college understand which foods will contribute to a lifetime of good health and which will add them to the ranks of the obese and the disease-ridden.
Home Economics and Other Classes
Fewer schools than ever before are providing students opportunities to develop usable life skills that they can take with them after graduation. Home economics and other types of self-sufficiency classes during or after school can go a long way towards not only teaching students what types of foods and eating habits are most healthy for them, but also how to prepare these foods for themselves.
Meal planning, smart shopping, the importance of seasonal and local produce, are all subtle but powerful elements of a healthy lifelong diet that educators at great schools, and even parent-volunteers, can teach to their students, giving them the gift of good health for years to come.