School health education: challenge for national and international agencies.

There are, in today's world, more than a billion young people of school age. Hundreds of millions of them are enrolled in the schools. They constitute the greatest single readily-reachable population group and present one of our greatest opportunities toward achieving a brighter health future. Are we availing ourselves of this opportunity? It is sad but true that too often school health education is considered as "something extra", a matter of peripheral interest, and is given low priority in school curriculum. Yet these young people--in the schools and outside them--are the parents, the citizens, the leaders of tomorrow. Theirs is the health of the future. We cannot afford to leave the health citizenship of the future to a generation only causally educated about life.