THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION AND A GOOD START IN LIFE
Everyone knows the important piece of advice that they should choose their parents carefully but the reasons for choosing your parents carefully are not clear cut. One reason might be that your parents had “good genes” but in spite of all the discussion about the human genome the genetic influence on life span and health span amounts to probably no more than 20% with much greater importance being due to social and environmental factors. Obviously, it is also sensible to choose parents that are wealthy but it may be that the most important characteristic of a prospective parent is their attitude to education and parents who are people who are value education highly will take whatever steps that need to be taken, whatever their level of income, to ensure that the children get a good education but what do we mean by a education?
Measuring education can be done in a number of different ways but often a simple method used by researchers is to assess the years of higher education and in one classic study the most important factor determining the risk of dementia turned out to be having a high school diploma. The researchers did not suggest that the subjects covered by high school diploma, algebra for example, were responsible for the reduced risk of dementia but it was that the high school diploma indicated many other issues linked to both wealth and parental culture.
How the educational level contributes to health is, like the impact of deprivation, is not clear but one obvious factor is that people with high levels of education get better, in every sense of the word, jobs, less stressful and better paid.
As with deprivation designing an intervention study to change education in some way and hope that you will be able to measure a change in the person’s level of ability fifty years later is, for obvious reasons, difficult to design, to organise and to get funded
However this does not mean that people who did not have a good start in life cannot live better longer. Everyone can improve their physical, cognitive and emotional wellbeing no matter what their start in life
Everyone knows the important piece of advice that they should choose their parents carefully but the reasons for choosing your parents carefully are not clear cut. One reason might be that your parents had “good genes” but in spite of all the discussion about the human genome the genetic influence on life span and health span amounts to probably no more than 20% with much greater importance being due to social and environmental factors. Obviously, it is also sensible to choose parents that are wealthy but it may be that the most important characteristic of a prospective parent is their attitude to education and parents who are people who are value education highly will take whatever steps that need to be taken, whatever their level of income, to ensure that the children get a good education but what do we mean by a education?
Measuring education can be done in a number of different ways but often a simple method used by researchers is to assess the years of higher education and in one classic study the most important factor determining the risk of dementia turned out to be having a high school diploma. The researchers did not suggest that the subjects covered by high school diploma, algebra for example, were responsible for the reduced risk of dementia but it was that the high school diploma indicated many other issues linked to both wealth and parental culture.
How the educational level contributes to health is, like the impact of deprivation, is not clear but one obvious factor is that people with high levels of education get better, in every sense of the word, jobs, less stressful and better paid.
As with deprivation designing an intervention study to change education in some way and hope that you will be able to measure a change in the person’s level of ability fifty years later is, for obvious reasons, difficult to design, to organise and to get funded
However this does not mean that people who did not have a good start in life cannot live better longer. Everyone can improve their physical, cognitive and emotional wellbeing no matter what their start in life