Study: Education Extends Longevity–Except for Black Males

Barbara Peters Smith:

The human longevity bonanza that gives newborns today three decades more of life expectancy than they would have had a century ago appears to have no real stopping point.
Now researchers are trying to determine how U.S. society should change to accommodate so many longer, healthier lifespans, and why one group of white Americans does not seem to be benefiting from the trend.
Published in the August issue of Health Affairs and reported widely in the media, the researchers’ study found that while everybody else is living longer, non-Hispanic white women without high school diplomas have actually lost five years of life expectancy and their male counterparts lost three years.

One response to “Study: Education Extends Longevity–Except for Black Males”

  1. Larry Winkler says:

    It’s not clear to me why this reporter, nor the study cited places the onus of cause on education level on longevity. I cannot imagine anyone actually believing that education or lack thereof is the causal variable determining life expectancy. The study itself does seem to be typical of poor scholarship in the educational fields.
    The original study article does at least cite some research showing the causal factors. It is to the cite one must go to understand the issues.
    They cite the article “Socio-economic differentials in peripheral biology: Cumulative allostatic load”, by Seeman, Epel, Gruenewald, et al. which is one article from a seminal book “The Biology of Disadvantage” from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
    To me, the research coming out regarding SES and stress (allostatic load) on adults and children is the single most important research result that explains the educational, emotional, and societal issues that everyone has been trying to address for the past 20 years and failing at.
    It is exciting because the research points directly to how we need to focus resources to solve these most pressing problems we face. We don’t have to guess any more. Here we will have object standards which will be biological marks of stress, and a focus preventing the damage and healing the damage to the physical body and mind known to be caused by “allostatic load”.
    We can gut the whole waste of time and money and resources on NCLB, teacher evaluations, “innovations” (which never really existed), charter vs public schools, blame games, and all the rest.
    Curriculum changes, standards, teaching methods improvements, testing, and all the rest, will be relegated to mere frosting where it has always belonged.

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