Essay on Health Education and Recreation

Health Education

Health education, being an amalgam of health and education, reflects the attributes of each and is committed to democratic learning processes, human dignity and community value systems.

Health education can be defined as the art of applying social and health sciences to facilitate the development of healthy lifestyles and behaviours among people. Information, communication, motivation and media are essential and integral components of health education. It helps people become health conscious and develops a high value for health.

It involves multi-disciplinary team work in planning educational strategies, in designing multi-media campaigns, in effective use of electronic and mass media and in folk communication activities. It is the art of working with people of various “backgrounds to satisfy their needs by their own actions and resources and by mobilizing the resources of other sectors. Its main function is to create appropriate educational opportunities in varying environments for people to make their own enlightened decisions and act upon them.

For this purpose, it uses home, market, and meeting place (community health education), school (school/ student health education), work place (industrial health education), and hospital (patient education), and employs methods and media suitable to the target groups and problems.

This type of learning is as complex as it is time consuming. But when practiced with sincerity and careful planning, it does yield the desired result as repeatedly demonstrated in many rural and urban areas of India. It has failed when its principles are ignored and unscientific methods are followed.

Those with Unrealistic expectations of quick and spectacular results, such as may be obtained in the medical, political, and administrative fields, will be greatly disappointed by the natural, slow but sure results produced by processes of education.

Recreation

Recreation is that kind of physical activity which requires physical effort or skill, for the purpose of relaxation or enjoyment and goes on through casual or organized participation. Recreation includes improvements in an individual’s physical, mental, social and personal qualities.

3. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, recreation is “The action of recreating (oneself or another), or fact of being recreated, by some pleasant occupation, pastime or amusement”. This word has been in use in this context since the 1400s.

The word ‘recreation* has been used in the sense of the meaning given in Oxford Dictionary, since 1900 A.D.

Recreation has purposes and is organised for social ends.

Recreation as a separate institutional component of social scene is found for the most part in ruralised societies with a high degree of organizational complexity. It is a social phenomenon.

Recreation must have a reason, a destination, a purpose. Leisure can be done by anyone at any time and be done anywhere.

Although we all have an instinct for play, as Dulles says, and we have a desire for leisure as Aristotle and Rybczynski maintain, only some of us have penchant for recreation and all its social ramifications.

Recreation is intended to restore one to wholeness, to health, for whatever purpose one may have.

‘Recreation’ (this word) has been in use in social sense since mid-nineteenth. John Kelly finds that recreation is rooted in the Latin recreation, which refers to restoration or recovery.

Kelly says that the “term implies the re-creation of energy or the restoration of ability to function.” This way of looking at recreation points to the many beaches in use for recreation.

Kelly also says that recreation “generally refers to more organized activity. Recreation is socially organized for social ends.” Recreation as a word is usually associated with sports. It has to be provided for organized and taught individuals.