How does literacy promote critical health and well being? It leads to reading, exploring, searching for healthy foods and substances to sustain our health and to the study of systems that can address health care successfully. Wellbeing is nurtured by exercise, movement, creativity, satisfying work, exciting travel— looking around the globe, if not physically—then virtually. It is not promoted by a total techno existence. Our literacy would help us understand this. Developed thumbs from playing computer games will not substitute for fresh air and games, bike riding, running, skipping, dancing, jumping. In advanced economies, parents do not necessarily feel comfortable with their children playing outside; they feel safer with them playing inside and usually in front of the television or a video game. This phenomenon contributes to critical unhealthy lifestyle and mal-being.

 

Adults suffer from these phenomena as well unless they build in recreation into their lives. If they do not want their children outside alone, then recreating altogether is one solution. However, this is not always feasible for poor people who work when their children are at home. Critical health and well-being is a most important feature of physical and mental

disease prevention in any society. Under consideration is a law saying that restaurants in Texas will be fined if they do not put healthy options on their menus. This is one way to promote healthy eating in a society that eats out a lot. Gardening, cooking, and eating at home are better options for all. Ironically, in the grand pay scale of reward systems in the world, people who produce food are remunerated the least. This needs to change. Perhaps some fields of health should be asked to give up some of their rewards to the sector of society that actually engages in food production. And of course universal health care is needed so desperately in the US and in other parts of the world. Making sure that people who work in the fields in food production have health care; making sure that all people have health care—that indeed is radical love.  

 

A critical understanding of social class can be done in all professions and walks of life if teachers with conscientization were able to practice meaningful aspects of critical pedagogy with their students who became doctors, lawyers, business people, service sector employees, self-employed and even those who remain unemployed and underemployed. Critical pedagogy helps understand that what we do in society and schools is often racist, classist, and sexist. Such pedagogy also helps comprehend the importance of life well-lived in unselfish ways—life connected to community and life that is gratifying because what people do makes them feel good about the world and themselves. Such an indoctrination runs counter to advanced capital societies’ ideologies of success as money and Hollywood idealized love and beauty. In order to shine the light of focus and open our ears and to the unspoken discourses of social awareness and environmental concerns, a critical pedagogist must work with

students in cultural areas that are not necessarily comfortable or easily accepted.

 

Critical engagement comes from the scholastic practices of critical pedagogy and critical literacy. An examination of unhealthy love relationships must enter this discussion since love is the foundation for marriage and family. An untenable relationship with indigenous peoples must also enter the discussion. It is unacceptable for some solely to reap the riches of resources that belong to the many, and it is the work of critical pedagogy to engage learners in thought about the allocation of resources—including water, petroleum, minerals , wealth, and property or real estate. All in the world deserve safe places to live with ample supply of food and other necessities.