Imagine the Next Normal -- Education

Part #8 in a series focused on creating healthier and safer communities for all

I am pushing back HARD against the desire to return to normal.

Instead of wanting to return to what was pre-COVID, I am stepping into the future — the NEXT NORMAL — with the hope that we can create healthier and safer communities for all. Returning to 2019 normal is unacceptable. PERIOD. It is unacceptable because we have all changed, grown, and learned so much living through (read: surviving) a pandemic.

I invite you to explore this NEXT NORMAL with me in this 10-part blog series (yes, I am fired up, inspired, and really excited). If you are jumping in today, please go back and read my inspiration for the series as well as my posts on physical health & access to healthcare, mental health, social & emotional health, community health, health equity, redefining health, and parenting.

The pandemic changed me. My first TV interview changed me. My weekly Facebook Lives changed me. These (unexpected) changes have reshaped and refocused me — I am now energized and have discovered my mission in life to create healthy communities. And I want to educate and empower everyone to be healthy as individuals and to create safe and healthy communities for everyone.

As I plan for and dream about the NEXT NORMAL, I have been thinking a lot about education — the pandemic showed me that some of the fundamental principles of public health need to be infused into all of our education.

“There are two forces on a collision course in our present society… First, is the absolute tsunami of health information that crashes on the public every day. The second is a public that is increasingly ill prepared to distinguish the silly from the sensible, the hype from the hypothesis.” ~Dr. Michael Bracken

This quote was written in 2014 (six years before the pandemic began).

It feels like a premonition.

Over the past two years, we have been inundated with information about the virus, preventing disease spread, being healthy, vaccines, treatments, variants, mortality, safety, and risk. And as a whole, the public was ill-prepared to weigh risks and care for the health of our community. Health education (yes, I am talking awkward middle and high school classes) has focused on individual health (eat well, exercise each day) and has stigmatized disease. In our schools, we limit health education to a semester in middle and high school. And the curriculum is far from comprehensive — we do not teach health across the curriculum, in biology, history, literature, art, communications, computer science, and math/statistics courses.

“Quality school health education (sh)ould include lessons on critical thinking, goal setting and social factors that affect health conveyed in an engaging style with real-life applications…” ~WRVO

Way back in 1987 the President of Swarthmore College (who was also an epidemiologist) was advocating that epidemiology be part of a college education. He wrote in the Annals of Epidemiology that —

“Epidemiology has features that resemble those of traditional liberal arts, this makes it fit for inclusion in an undergraduate curriculum. As a low technology science, epidemiology is readily accessible to nonspecialists. Because it is useful for taking a first look at a new problem, it is applicable to a broad range of interesting phenomena. Furthermore, it emphasizes method rather than arcane knowledge and illustrates the approaches to problems and the kinds of thinking that a liberal education should cultivate: the scientific method, analogic thinking, deductive reasoning, problem solving within constraints, and concern for aesthetic values”

In the early 2000s, both the Institute for Medicine and the Association of American Colleges and Universities supported the notion that public health and epidemiology should be part of a college education. However, when less than 40% of the US population attends and graduates from college, I want to propose that in the next normal we include public health and epidemiology in the curriculum for middle and high schools.

“Given the growing public health challenges facing the world, (everyone) needs an introduction to key issues in the field (of public health and epidemiology) to be informed citizens.” ~from Epidemiology 101 published in 2007

In the NEXT NORMAL public health education needs to be accessible and applicable to all. If health is being redefined as a radical selfless act of loving others, where we think of being healthy as growing and sustaining a health(eco)system, then we need to educate our communities (and each other) about how to be healthy individuals and as a community. The vocabulary, key concepts, and lessons of epidemiology should not be available only to those who choose to do public health work. These are not our subjects to hoard and lord over those who do not want to work in the field of public health.

So this is an invitation to learn more about public health — so that you can be healthy as an individual and we can work together to create healthy communities.

I invite you to take my Introduction to Epidemiology class, which is FREE (you just need to log in with an email account). I am adding five new modules and new application exercises in the coming weeks. Invite the middle and high school students in your life to take the course over the summer! Grab a friend and go through the course together.

Additionally — there are great public health podcasts to listen to (I recommend Public Health On Call and This Podcast Will Kill You; I also think Color Code is one of those podcasts that everyone should listen to). And if you are a reader, there are so many wonderful public health books. I recommend starting with The Great Influenza, On Immunity, and Being Mortal. I am putting together a comprehensive book list.

Stay tuned…

But in the meantime, I would encourage you to embrace the fact that health and health education need to be reframed and made accessible to all.

Being healthy is a radical selfless act of loving others.

The work that we have ahead of us — to change health education and share the vocabulary, concepts, and lessons of epidemiology across our communities — involves each of us. We need to encourage each other to embrace education as a never-ending process. And we need to seek opportunities to learn about and share the knowledge of public health with others — so that we can all be healthy.

Life is a team sport.

We are all public health.