Role of education in preserving traditional cultures and as development factor

Abstract

Independent of international assistance, the socioeconomic development and improvement of national health have been insignificant in several poor countries during the last 10–20 years. The main problems of these countries are multidisciplinary matters, both regarding causative factors and solutions. In the field of health, high priority medical problems are not found in the curative sector of medicine but rather within prevention, with environmental sanitation, water supply, family planning and nutrition. These are the most profitable fields for internal support as well as international assistance, offering lasting development effects and acceptable cost-benefit relations. Primary school education is of major importance in that it provides local tribal youngsters to be selected for training as auxiliary health workers for staffing of the chain of rural dispensaries, which seems to be the key to national health development, and to the WHO goal “health for all by the year 2000.” In several developing countries, locally recruited youth with 5–7 years of primary education already constitute indispensable links between professional health services and delicate issues such as birth control and a — usually illiterate — rural population. Illiteracy is considered the main obstacle for general socioeconomic and national health development in poor countries. Primary education is a threshold and a bottleneck which has to be overcome before a fruitful cooperation with local rural people can be organized, and before the rather worn-out — but seldom applied — slogan “help to self-help” can become a reality. This approach so guarantees consideration of “the total man in his total environment.”