Health Education circa 2035—A Commentary

Abstract

Most of us are intrigued by the prospect of the future and at some point in our lives we all think about how interesting it would be if we could see into the future. In the 1960s, Rod Serling gave us the Twilight Zone, a show that from time-to-time revealed to us what life might be like in the future. In the 1960 movie, The Time Machine (not its forgettable 2002 remake) actor Rod Taylor, as H. George Wells, traveled far into the future to find that the world as he knew it largely had been destroyed and the human race that survived had divided into two hostile species. In 2010, I was asked to represent the American Association for Health (AAHE) at the 125th Annual Meeting of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) in Indianapolis, when the Alliance's various constituents assembled to reflect on its 125 years, with a focus on its most recent quarter of a century. In some ways it was ironic that I was asked to be AAHE's soothsayer for that occasion. You see, a little more than 30 years ago, while in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I purchased my own hand-held Texas Instruments Statistical Calculator and an office mate bought one of the first microcomputers, a Radio Shack device whose storage system was magnetic cassette tape. At that point I predicted that technology had advanced as far as I was likely to see in my lifetime. Therefore, if my insights are as good now as they were then, all of you might as well stop reading. On the 100th anniversary of AAHPERD in 1985, the late Peter Cortese, a renowned educator and President of AAHE, was asked to speculate about our future as I was asked to do. Cortese was concerned about the back to basics movement that started rising in 1980s education rubric and that developed into a dogma that eventually became iconic as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. In the zeal to attain a targeted test score and achieve a sought after benchmark of school performance, the utility and simplicity of Cortese's worry of there being nothing more basic than health was lost on schools. Today, we are fighting for the return of formal physical education requirements amidst a much-publicized epidemic of childhood obesity and a generation of sedentary youth. Cortese warned us that it was penny-wise and pound-foolish to decrease funding for community programs. Today, Lastly, Cortese addressed himself to the evolution of the education profession itself. Voluntary certification of educators was to occur less than five years after he addressed the 1985 assembly. However, more than 20 years later, the certification scepter has not made much headway with employers and educators and still languishes somewhere low within the hierarchy of professionals. So, what will life be like in 2035, and what will its implications be for the way in which education is practiced? To say the least, that is a challenging question. In the late 1980s, as our education MPH program was evolving at the University of South Florida College of Public Health, some colleagues and I were asked to survey a random sample of the Who's Who in Health Education to gain insight about the preparation of educators in research and practice for the 1990s and beyond. What we received with perfect acuity was not insight about the future, but rather, profoundly detailed hindsight of the ideal preparation of the educator for the 1970s. The best education minds could not come to terms with change and uncertainty, and being out of their comfort zones. …