Towards a healthy education: Humanizing education and the educationalisation of health

When speaking about the "educationalisation of social problems", theoreticians not seldom are condescending about it. Given their confidence with postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, the educationalisation of social problems is easily perceived as a set of questionable interventions of governments in educational practices. For to what extent can a political agenda do justice to public education? Indeed, from such a perspective, schools are first and foremost subject to modernist mechanisms and Foucauldian control systems. And democratic governments appear to be slightly totalitarian when educationalizing or 'over-schooling' social reality. However, it is unclear to us whether much would be left of an education freed from the burden of social problems. Or even stronger, is it to be considered a burden after all? After having described at least four running meanings of the concept of educationalisation, we discuss three popular criticisms, i.e. the argument that educationalisation is based on a modernist idea of education, that it is a way in which governments dispose themselves of their political responsibilities, and that educationalisation almost equals with (or is symptomatic of) processes of governmentality. In reaction to this criticisms, we argue that education cannot be completely freed from the educationalisation of social issues (unless perhaps with a radically different concept of it). In that respect, one might wonder whether a democratic ordainment always bears something of a totalitarian regime in it. And suppose that social problem are banned from schools, what kind of education would we end up with. These and other issues are investigated while referring to concerns about and initiatives in health education in order to exemplify this.no ISBNstatus: publishe