THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN PROMOTING HEALTHY EATING: CROATIAN PARENTS` AND TEACHERS` PERSPECTIVES

Education is about much more than the simple learning of facts and academic lessons. It is a social institution through which children are also taught cultural values, norms, and expected behaviours. Every nation in the world is equipped with some form of education system. In its Education Strategy for 2014-2021 UNESCO advocates a humanistic and holistic vision of education as a fundamental human right that is essential to personal and socio-economic development and that aims at empowering people to fulfil their personal expectations for a healthy life, and contribute to the achievement of their societies’ socio-economic development objectives. Not only does UNESCO stress this point but the scientific audience (Birch, 2017; Boyd and Hord, 1994; Caniello et al. 2016; Drake et al. 2016; Lawrence, 2009, etc.) has also shown increased attention towards the relationship between health and education as is evidenced by better educated individuals achieving better health outcomes as well as healthier children being more likely to attain higher educational outcomes. There are different health issues included in the school health curriculum, ranging from hygiene, alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity and eating disturbances, etc., This paper focuses on the role of education in improving the eating habits of school children that are necessary to ensure that children are healthy in order to optimize their learning and well-being. Nowadays children are suffering from undernourishment, excessive weight or obesity, and this paper aims to investigate the involvement of education in preventing these issues. In order to achieve this, a survey among teachers and parents was conducted in the Republic of Croatia, an emerging country in Southeast Europe, with a rising prevalence of adolescenct obesity. The study was guided by the following research questions: RQ1: Whether the Croatian education system understands the importance of the relationship between education and healthy nutrition habits? and RQ2: Are there differences between the perceptions of parents and teachers about the quality of the school health education system? The findings showed that Croatian schools provided an opportunity to prevent and manage these various forms of malnutrition and contributed to improving educational outcomes. However, there is a perception that schools stressing health education activities in this area are still the minority. For the vast majority of those working in schools, health education remains an activity that is not as important as it should be.