“A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE HEALTH & PHYSICAL EDUCATION CURRICULUM AT SENIOR SECONDARY STAGE IN SCHOOLS OF DELHI”

Schools have long been viewed as important settings for promoting the health and social development of children. In many countries, the first schools were often established by churches, charities and other Non Government Organisations (NGOs), to socialize and take care of the children whose parents had moved into cities during industrialization. Later, health education was introduced in schools, driven primarily by the medical fraternity with exhortations about the dangers of various diseases. The school was, and still is, seen by many as a site for health messages, materials, and prevention programs. Consequently, we have seen a wide variety of issue-specific and narrowly framed approaches to school health promotion come, stay or go across the educational landscape. Active schools (designed to increase physical activity), drug-free schools (designed to prevent drug use in, near, and beyond school), and safe schools (designed to prevent intentional and unintentional physical and psychological harm) are just three examples of approaches developed in response to specific societal health issues. Present study is a content analysis of the health and physical education textbooks of senior secondary class’s i. e class XI and XII in schools of Delhi. Unit wise analysis of both the textbooks has been done. The main findings of the analysis are that the topic deal in the textbook are related to health and hygiene well but there is a need to discuss programmes and schemes associated with the topis such as yoga etc. One of the most important issues HIV/AIDS and Drug abuse have not been discussed in appropriate details in the books. Methodology of the study is Content Analysis.