Emancipatory Health Education & Environmental Education: The Emergence of the New Public Health

Abstract

AbstractThis paper attempts to illustrate the influence of an emerging New Public Health on the relationship between health education and environmental education. This New Public Health places health on the political agenda. In so doing it involves a critical examination of the underlying and pervasive ideology of individualism which is so embedded within conventional health education. Health education tends to focus on individual behavioural factors for health and ignores the wider environmental, social, economic and political factors. However, a new consciousness within health education serves to critique the existing relationship between individualism and health and is essentially concerned with examining the broader influences on health.The paper concludes optimistically by suggesting that this new consciousness encapsulating the notion of an Emancipatory Health Education in schools has the potential for encouraging emancipatory social change involving a recognition of the social and environmental constraints on health. Because of this there needs to be a rethink and a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between school health education and environmental education.