Question

Read the issue brief from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation entitled “Education Matters for Health” 2009

There appears to be a dose-response relationship between educational attainment and health—the more you get, the better it is. Why this is true is not clearly understood, though several reasonable hypotheses have been proposed. Describe the 3 interrelated pathways presented as explanations for this relationship in this brief. Which do you feel is the strongest? Why? According to data presented in the brief, “the United States is the only industrialized nation where young people currently are less likely than members of their parents’ generation to be high-school graduates.” What evidence is given to support this statement? Why do you think this situation exists? What will it take to correct it? As would be expected, parents’ educational attainment is linked to their children’s health and even their educational attainment. These linkages, in turn, influence the health and educational attainment of their children’s children, as well, perpetuating an endless intergenerational cycle of high (or low) educational attainment and its associated better (or poorer) health. How does this fit with the biblical understanding of multigenerational influence (Exodus 34:6–7)? In what ways can the Church help interrupt the vicious cycle beginning with low educational attainment? Pray that God will use you to be a positive influence on your children in this area or on others whom God will bring across your path.

Answer 1

First, education has a number of downstream benefits that may lead to improved health, including a higher income, lower odds of being unemployed or having a job that does not provide health insurance, various social and psychological benefits that arise from the social environment at school, and the cognitive and social skills that are acquired in high school and college. Other downstream benefits include the resources and knowledge to adopt healthier behaviors and the resources to live in healthier neighborhoods.

Second, some suggest that there is a selection phenomenon at work, with people who are less healthy being less likely to succeed and advance in their education so that the people who do end up going farther in school are healthier; in this case better health would lead to more education rather than the reverse. Woolf said that while there is a body of evidence suggesting that education affects health more than the other way around, it is still important to try to improve the health and wellness of students so they can succeed in school.

The third possibility is that various contextual factors—what an epidemiologist would call confounding variables—affect both education and health. The list of contextual factors would include adverse childhood events that can affect brain development and social, emotional, and cognitive development as well as childhood health and nutrition, parental and maternal health, stress, immigrant status, gender, and socioeconomic status. He noted that data show a clear link between adverse childhood events and increased odds of adult diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lung disease, and depression.

The most important effect-

Education typically leads to better jobs, more money and many other benefits, including better health insurance, which leads to better access to quality health care. Higher earnings also allow workers to afford homes in safer neighborhoods as well as healthier diets. The median wage for college graduates in 2012 was one-and-a-half times higher than that of high school graduates and more than double that of workers who lacked a high school diploma.

People with lower incomes often live in neighborhoods or communities that present numerous challenges that affect their health, including less access to supermarkets and healthy food choices, less access to green space or other recreational areas, higher crime rates, lower quality schools, fewer jobs and increased levels of pollution.

Low-income areas also often have shortages of primary care physicians and other health care professionals. However, the report points out that people with lower levels of education have worse health than those with more education even when access to care is equal. For example, a 2011 survey of patients in the same health system found that nearly 70 percent of college graduates ages 25-64 described their health as very good or excellent, compared to 32 percent of adults who had not completed high school.

The bottom line is that strengthening schools likely would make our nation healthier and reduce health care spending in the long run. Even if our legislators fail to see the connection between education and health, we can make sure that our patients -- especially children and their parents -- do.

The United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma, the report said.

High schools are required to meet graduation targets every year as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

But those targets are set by states, not by the federal government. And most states allow schools to graduate low percentages of students by saying that any progress, or even the status quo in some cases, is acceptable.

Why are states setting the bar so low?

Because they can, said Bob Balfanz, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

State and school officials are under pressure to improve test scores under the No Child Left Behind education law or else face penalties. But they got a break on graduation rates: Schools have to meet annual goals, but the government lets each state set its own goal.

So in North Carolina — which has won praise for a series of innovations to keep kids in school — the graduation goal has not changed. Officials are coming up with a new goal but are hoping that No Child Left Behind will be rewritten to be less punitive.

In North Carolina, schools must improve by 0.1 percentage point each year. At that rate, it would take nearly a century to raise the graduation rate, now 72 percent, to the state goal of 80 percent

If you really want to bring about change, you have to have reachable goals that people believe they can work toward,

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, d“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and egracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast flove and faithfulness, 7 gkeeping steadfast love for thousands,1 hforgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but iwho will by no means clear the guilty, jvisiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Church on educational attainment

In the view of some scholars, the 16th-century Protestant Reformation was a driving force for public education in Europe. Protestant reformers promoted literacy because of their contention that everyone needed to read the Bible, which they viewed as the essential authority on doctrinal matters. Driven by this theological conviction, religious leaders urged the building of schools and the translation of the Bible into local languages – and Reformation leader Martin Luther set the example by translating the Bible into German.

Some scholars, however, argue that the “Second Reformation” of the German Pietist movement in the 17th and 18th centuries was even more influential in promoting literacy. Historians Richard L. Gawthrop of Franklin College and the late Gerald Strauss of Indiana University note that in addition to stressing the need for personal Bible reading, the Pietists persuaded German authorities to mandate Bible reading as “the chief instrument of religious instruction in primary schools, [which was] a powerful impetus to the spread of mass literacy.”38

In more recent times, religion was a prime motivator in establishing U.S. schools run by faith groups – including Quakers, Protestants and Catholics – that educated generations of immigrant families.39

Historically, however, Christianity and science often have come into conflict with each other, as illustrated by the 17th century clash between astronomer Galileo Galilei and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the condemnation by prominent religious leaders of Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of human evolution. The Scopes Monkey trial in 1925 further highlighted the rift between science and some branches of Christianity over the theory of evolution, a contentious relationship that endures even today.40

In sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, scholars describe how religious missionaries during colonial times were the prime movers in constructing educational facilities and influencing local attitudes toward education. These missionary activities, the scholars conclude, have had a long-lasting positive impact on access to schooling and educational attainment levels in the region.

Research by Baylor University sociologist Robert D. Woodberry, for instance, suggests that Protestant missionaries in Africa “had a unique role in spreading mass education” because of the importance they placed on ordinary people’s ability to read scripture. As a result, they established schools to promote literacy wherever they went and translated the Bible into indigenous languages.41

Harvard University economics professor Nathan Nunn, who contends that education was “the main reward used by missionaries to lure Africans into the Christian sphere,” says that in addition to establishing schools, “missionaries may have altered people’s views about the importance of education.”42

Woodberry and Nunn conclude, however, that Protestant and Catholic missionaries had differing results. Except where they were in direct competition with Protestant missionaries, Catholic missionaries concentrated on educating African elites rather than the masses, Woodberry observes. And Nunn notes that Protestant missionaries placed greater stress than Catholics on educating women. As a result, Protestants had more long-term impact on the education of sub-Saharan African women