Exploring Education for Health

2013-14 Perpectives Fall: By Walter C. Johnson, Headmaster: Some parents may have seen the Journal News’ interview of me in their recent educational supplement, Education Outlook: Private Schools September 2013. In it, I described Ethel Allen’s and her family’s intentions in making their exceptional gift to Hackley of paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley:

to support “a center for physical activity … not just a gym, but a center dedicated to life learning, physical activity, and knowledge of the body in motion.” Her hope was that, “every student will graduate with a thorough knowledge of nutrition and the value and experience of exercise suitable to him or her.” This goal will allow Hackley to create not only a new center for athletics, including a new pool, but a K-12 health and physical education facility reflecting emergent thinking on health and wellness.
2013-14 Perpectives Fall: By Walter C. Johnson, Headmaster: Some parents may have seen the Journal News’ interview of me in their recent educational supplement, Education Outlook: Private Schools September 2013. In it, I described Ethel Allen’s and her family’s intentions in making their exceptional gift to Hackley of paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley:

to support “a center for physical activity … not just a gym, but a center dedicated to life learning, physical activity, and knowledge of the body in motion.” Her hope was that, “every student will graduate with a thorough knowledge of nutrition and the value and experience of exercise suitable to him or her.” This goal will allow Hackley to create not only a new center for athletics, including a new pool, but a K-12 health and physical education facility reflecting emergent thinking on health and wellness.

Many of us are familiar with the quotation from the Latin, Mens sana in corpore sano, which means “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Juvenal is the author, and later in his poem adds that only through virtue may we attain such a good life. We understand that the health of the body can shape the health of the mind – they are inextricably connected. Health education, then, broadly conceived, should teach us how to lead balanced, successful lives, in terms not only of exercise, nutrition, and stress management, but through fulfilling work and the love of friends and family. With the inspiration of the Allen bequest, Hackley aspires to be a national leader in K-12 health curricula broadly conceived, and to educate in turn leaders who will find new ways for us to live well, in ethical relationship with our fellow human beings and our environment.

As you will read in the Hackley School Report on Giving and Volunteering for 2013, the Board of Trustees has established an ad hoc Committee on Health and Physical Education to explore what such a K-12 Health curriculum would look like.

Chaired by Trustee Dr. David Berry ’96, with members Trustee Dr. Pamela Gallin Yablon P ’02, ’05, ’10 and Alumni Association President Dr. William G. Roberts ’75, P ’10, ’13 (all three medical doctors, and in Dr. Berry’s case, also a Ph.D.), the Committee is supported by Steve Bileca, Hackley’s Middle School Director, as staff liaison.
As we explore this newly expansive conception of Health Education (it might be heuristically useful to see how our ideas change if we label it instead, “education for health”), it’s useful to review how Hackley has conceived such a thing in the past. In December 1904, our first Headmaster, Dr. Theodore Chickering Williams, said in his farewell sermon to the School:

As the architect[s], my wife and I planned each detail of these noble structures, we thought only of their vital meaning. Here was a place for solitude; here for work or play; each arch, or step, or window or corridor, each device for better air, or light or water, was planned as a part of a harmonious whole. We always asked how these things would affect the character, freedom or happiness of our boys. It was because of this harmonizing aim, that the spirit of beauty inevitably prevailed….

More than that, you have felt a real respect for your surroundings and that you yourselves were honored in them. People say to me, “It must be easy to be good, up here.” That is what I have tried for, to make a place where it would be “easy to be good.”

We recognize here a holistic design, the sense that the physical environment is an important factor in shaping physical and emotional well-being, which in turn supports moral education as part of what we mean by “health.” In curriculum planning, teachers sometimes use what we call “backward design”: we start with the goals that we want to achieve, then consider how we would assess those goals (that is, assure ourselves that the goals have been achieved), and then finally design the lessons that will be employed. In Dr. Williams’ sermon, we can see how he has used an educational goal to shape even the school buildings and landscape as tools to help achieve it. Over the last decades, Hackley has tried to honor Dr. Williams’ original intentions in creating new buildings, trying always to consider how they will shape the educational experience of our students.

As we think about “education for health,” then, we are not considering simply a redefinition of a discrete course in Health Education – we are considering how everything we do can support the goal of education for health.

Aristotle notes that while intellectual virtue is developed by teaching, moral virtue is formed by habit. Contemporary Health Education is largely focused on what Aristotle would call one of the moral virtues – temperance, or self-control.

We try to teach our children not to overeat, not to smoke, not to drink alcohol, not to use drugs. Aristotle would advise us that teaching information is not enough; we need to form strong habits at an early age, with those habits anchored to and reinforced by the physical and social environment as well as the instructional program. That suggests that a key focus for this holistic conception of education for health will be Lower and Middle School, where habits are first formed.

What does all this abstract talk mean, in practical terms? One example might be nutrition. Instead of simply teaching the “Food Pyramid” as they did when I was in primary school, or “My Plate” as the USDA currently recommends, and insisting on healthier foods in the cafeteria, we might create a greenhouse where Lower and Middle School students would grow food crops, and a teaching kitchen where they would learn to cook with healthy ingredients, so that when they eat meals they’ve helped create, they understand what the components of such prepared foods might be. Such nutritional study could be integrated with science (botany and biology) and history (the foods of different cultures and how nutrition has affected the rise and fall of civilizations).The idea is not to inculcate habits to the exclusion of knowledge and intellectual skills, but to have habits as the anchor for that standard curricular content.

That single possibility illustrates how wide-ranging our exploration must be. As we consider such health initiatives and facilities in the years to come, we will also strengthen our already exemplary programs in physical education and athletics, planning for a new gym and pool, expanded basketball, fencing, squash, track and wrestling facilities, and fitness resources to serve adults as well as students in our community. The coming years will be exciting indeed.
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