In health-education classes, kids today learn all about how the pituitary gland changes during puberty and how drugs can clog brain synapses.
In the mid-19th Century, health education in schools consisted mainly of the message “wash your hands.”
And even that good advice was based on a misconception–the “miasma” theory that disease was spread through noxious odors instead of germs, said John Allegrante, of the New York City-based National Center for Health Education.
“We really didn’t have a scientific base from which we could make recommendations to people about health,” Allegrante said. “We didn’t have much scientific understanding of the link between behavior and health.”
But in little more than a century, an explosion of scientific knowledge on what helps and harms the human body has made sophisticated health-education programs mainstays of American schooling.
In the Chicago area, the Robert Crown Center for Health Education, at 21 Salt Creek Lane in Hinsdale, has been at the forefront of efforts to teach kids how to stay well for more than 25 years.
“Health education has come a long, long, long, long way in a very short time,” director John Zaremba said.
Each year, the center runs health sessions for students from 2,800 schools as far away as Wisconsin and Indiana.
They learn about everything from anatomy and ovulation to substance abuse and AIDS through a combination of instruction and multimedia displays.
The kids will be better informed than their predecessors in the 1800s, who lived when bloodletting was still viewed as a great way to cure a malady.
It wasn’t until the early 1900s that physical education and nutrition began to catch on in schools, Allegrante said. There were anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol campaigns, too, but those vices were perceived largely as moral, not medical, dangers.
