Ayurveda was a system in ancient India which had its supreme duty in preventing diseases and maintaining health, rather than in curing diseases. In this it followed the principle of congruence between content and form, content meaning a particular corpus of knowledge and the ways of imparting and acquiring it, form meaning life and the forms of life. It was not a special discipline which made Ayurveda preventive but a way of life which enabled people to create conditions for a healthy (and happy) life.
If this was true and possible in the past, then we shall think of adopting this principle of congruence between content and form to modern life as well. For this, the author has developed a theoretical framework in which primary prevention in its widest sense takes the centre as a strategy of health promotion. In this contribution to a philosophy of education, the Sutra Sthana of the Caraka Samhita, one of the main Ayurveda texts, is analysed. Though much emphasis is put on life-long self-education, it is also made clear that a modern 'Ayurveda Health Education' has to become community education in order to help people perceive their world by conscientisating their situation and by this empower them to create new social circumstances.
This education, then, can become an integral part of popular education by, amongst other things, employing P. Freire's concept of dialogue which cannot exist in the absence of profound love for the world and humankind.
Dr. Bernd Pflug has held posts in formal and non-formal education in several countries. At present he is a teacher at Kodaikanal International School and a guest faculty at the Centre for Adult, Continuing Education and Extension of the University of Kerala in Trivandrum. His current scholarly work is concerned with issues of humanism as a political philosophy in international relations.
In India, as elsewhere, the definition of health by the World Health Organization (WHO) has been acknowledged. The WHO has defined health as the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, rather than merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
This definition, formulated in the Constitution of the WHO in 1946 for the first time, represents the understanding that health is not only a state of physical well-being but the integrated functioning of the physical, mental and social planes. The understanding of health confined to the physical domain had dominated the health care services of many countries and societies for decades and centuries. With the new understanding counless efforts emerged over the recent past to put the new goal into practice.
In health education, as in the curative areas of medicine, the major challenge was to tackle problems of the mental and social planes of health and disease. To make people feel well all-around implies to develop appropriate means to achieve this. Health education had to be extended to meet the needs of the whole person. One follow-up of the new understanding of health in the industrialized countries was, for example, the intensified research in stress to find out its many relationships with diseases in the cardio-vascular field. Health education faced major problems of how to design strategies which included not only the prevention of diseases clearly marked as physical ones but of diseases which originate form particular life-styles. Questions of a balanced diet, of how to relax properly and of how to detect early symptoms of a deviation from normalcy had and have to be answered. This all led to the rivival of the age-old saying that prevention is better than cure.
Large programmes are implemented to detect, check and iso-late single risk factors which might be indirectly or directly responsible for a disease or which could announce a potential disease. People are advised to behave in a certain way in order to avoid particular diseases. All the available means of communication at individual, group and mass media level are used to make the complete well-being of man possible. Health education is no longer restricted to some more or less simple advice to school children but has developed into a discipline of education with a, strong foothold in the behavioural sciences. People are asked to participate in programmes to improve their health behaviour. In the long run a change in attitudes is aimed at. Besides regular health education classes in school, many non-formal activities are offered by the mass media, welfare institutions and the various agencies of adult and continuing education. Health education has become a movement which tries to embrace people from all age groups and from different strata of society.
Despite all these programmes, at least in the industrialized countries, basic problems have remained, for example, how to enable and stimulate people to live a life conducive to health? Research is conducted in order to answer this important question. Experts in the field discuss whether health education should join socio-political movements in order to participate in the active work to change society if the system of a society is found responsible for the emergence of disseases. Only through a change of socio-economic structures, they argue, would people of the weaker sections be empowered to lead a better, i.e., a healthier life. Other questions are raised in this context. How to coordinate the numerous activities into a strategy with one language and one objective? When to start health education - just after or even before birth or much later?
It soon becomes clear that health education is still lacking basic concepts which are of a theoretical nature and by that of a more universal understanding. The main questions which have to be asked and answered by a philosophy of education are still largely unanswered in health education: What is it? What ought it to accomplish? By what means can this be done? This lack of critical reflection becomes more evident the more we understand health and disease as part and parcel of the emotional and social domains of man.
It is this situation - the broadening of the understanding of health and disease and the lack of critical reflection of it which has motivated me to work on this study. I am of the opinion that health education can be supported by a philosophy of education to pose a constructive challenge to the mere technocratic solutions which are often preferred today. The latter may be more convenient for daily life, but in the long run it will be of limited help because it does not provide people with a solid knowledge of what one is doing why.
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