What is Health Education?
Who are professional Health Educators?
Do you know anyone whose profession is Health Education?
The essence of the thought provoking questions above is not necessarily so that you would answer them, however it is ok to know the answers.
I literally never encountered a professional Health Educator until my JSS3 (9th grade), and I won't be surprise to hear that you haven't encountered any yet.
Health Educators are indispensible, while the Doctor treats us when we get sick, the Health Educator teaches us what to do in order not to get sick and how to improve in our level of wellbeing.
But how many persons know about Health Educators?
How many children have you ever heard saying "I will be a Health Educator in the future"?
I recently conducted a study to ascertain the knowledge and attitude towards Health Education as a profession, among children in Agip Estate, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and I will share with you here the things I discovered.
The motivation for the study was my observation while a Teacher in one of the schools in that area; I observed that the majority of the students (during their career day, and from my personal interrogation) either said they wanted to be a Lawyer, Doctor or Engineer, absolutely no one said they wanted to be a Health Educator in the future; as a graduate of Health Education, that caught my attention, and I also believed there must be an explanation for that, so I set out to investigate the issue personally.
The first thing I discovered was that none of the Vocational aptitude textbooks available in the school had Health Education as a profession in it, however in some of the physical and Health Education textbooks, there was a mention of areas of specialization in Physical and Health Education, and Health Education was one of those areas, however it wasn't given much emphasis.
Secondly, the students' career choices seem to be influenced by that of their parents, at least some of them said they want to be this or that because their parents want them to.
Thirdly, I found that these children also had interest in high paying careers. Someone said "I want to be a Doctor so that I can earn plenty of money".
Hence, I had a clue to what the problem was. However, I further designed a study to find out the knowledge and attitude towards the Health Education Profession; does it mean that the students have not been given proper career orientaion regarding Health Education? If they knew about the profession, would they like to be Health Educators? These were my thoughts.
The result of the study?
None of them (I mean zero) said they knew about Health Education as a profession, and none of them said they know a Health Educator. How about their attitude towards Health Education as a profession? All of them agreed that Health Educators are doing a good job, when I briefly explained who a Health Educator is, and most of them also indicated that they would like to be Health Educators, furthermore, one of them who affirmed that Health Educators are doing a great job, and that he would have loved to be a Health Educator also said that he wouldn't, because his parents want him to become an Engineer.
Hence there seem to be a low level of knowledge of the Health Education profession among our kids, however, they may have positive attitude towards the profession.
So more orientation is needed in our schools to increase awareness of the Health Education profession.
